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a-god-in-ruins-rises · 2 years ago

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A timely prompt for you: what is your opinion or takes on historical originalism versus modern textualist-originalism and/or plain textualism? Do you think we should hew precisely to the letter of our founding documents and their amendments or is the concept of a "Living Document" more appropriate? Which do you believe the Founders would have intended for us all these centuries later?

oh yes. this is a good question. a very big, complex question. one that i probably won't be able to answer to my own satisfaction.

so i operate in some kind of middle ground.

i think both the letter and spirit of the law are important, but ultimately the spirit of the law reigns supreme. so i generally find the "original public meaning" to be a pretty good rule of thumb. and i tend to take the hamiltonian interpretation of the constitution. which is to say i take an expansive view. just because a particular right or power isn't specifically enumerated doesn't mean it doesn't exist. in the case of rights, the constitution even explicitly mentions this fact. and in the case of implied powers, it's simply logical. i think it's also important to consider that even rights which are enumerated aren't necessarily limitless or absolute.

my point is that the constitution obviously comes down to interpretation, and the original meaning of the constitution has to mean something. otherwise what's the point of even having a constitution if it can just mean anything you want? but at the same time, i do see america as alive. america is a living organism. and so the constitution must necessarily be so as well. the constitution is like america's dna. and maybe it changes over time, intentionally and unintentionally, for better or for worse. but these changes must be small and incremental and remedied where defective, otherwise it will mutate out of control into something grotesque and bound for death.

i guess what i'm really getting at is...i'm an originalist and a good-faith cosntructionist. what i mean by that is i think the original meaning/intent of the constitution is important, both subjective and objective (though i personally put more weight behind the objective), and i believe this should be a guiding principle in interpretations of the constitution. HOWEVER, america is alive and america is dynamic and so is her constitution. the meaning of the constitution is being constantly constructed. when it's being properly guided by the original meaning and the spirit of the law, it's in good faith. when it grossly stretches the letter of the law to invent some radical new right or power it is bad faith judicial activism.

so this is why i'm on board with something like social security. social security isn't explicitly mentioned in the constitution, but it's well within the spirit of the general welfare clause. or same with the fda. the fda isn't in the constitution, but it's within the spirit of the commerce clause. times change. and we have to constantly renegotiate the constitution as new problems emerge. but that negotiation has to be in good faith and guided by some principle. and that principle is the the original intent/meaning. and what that may be (or how/if intent and meaning are distinguished and to what degree) is another question for another time.

as for what our founding fathers thought, i don't think they agreed. i think they were all originalists in a sense, but you have some like jefferson who were probably closer to a "strict constructionist" (having an impossibly narrow, literal view of the constitution) and hamilton would have been a bit more expansive. and i think that's funny because jefferson was the one who said that a perpetual constitution was impossible and that the earth belongs to the living. so in a way, jefferson was more a "living constitutionalist" than hamilton. this just highlights how complicated this conversation really gets.

so jefferson wanted a very strict, literal interpretation of the constitution. hamilton wanted a more expansive "general meaning" that was more in line with the spirit of the law than its letter. madison was a strange middle ground. he generally sided with jefferson. he opposed the national bank on the same grounds. that the power to create a bank wasn't explicitly enumerated so therefore it's unconstitutional. however, when he became president he chartered a national bank.

and obviously people were like "yo, you're a hypocrite" but he said "no. i still have my personal views. but the personal views of any one founder must give way to public judgement." so even though he still personally believed the bank was unconstitutional he saw that hamilton's interpretation had won over public judgement (president, legislature, courts, and public opinion) and so he went along with it.

to summarize: i don't think the courts can just wake up one day and be like "yeah we have the second amendment but clearly the people want gun control and since the constitution is living and changing we've decided to ignore the second amendment." that would be bad faith judicial activism. the letter and spirit must both mean something. but too strict or too literal of an adherence to the letter of the law is too restrictive to the point of stagnation. a broader, good-faith constructionist view is necessary for good, energetic governance. so i'm in favor of a reasonable middle ground between "strict originalism" and "limitless living document".

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duhragonball · 4 years ago

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Hellsing Liveblog Ch. 82-86

LIKE A BLOODY STORM

Atsuku LIKE A BLOODY STONE

So it’s come to this. This is the “Black Onyx” arc and “Sorcerian Part 1″, where we finally get the payoff to the Major’s 55-year plot against Alucard. Walter betrayed Integra, the Hellsing Organization, and the whole United Kingdom just so Millennium would give him a chance to beat Alucard, and he’s failing. Alucard doesn’t see any point in dragging this out, so he’s sucking up all the fresh blood in London to power up and bring and end to this. Also, if you’re just joining us, Alucard looks like a 14-year-old girl. Just roll with it.

But the Major was counting on Alucard doing this, and apparently his plan to “poison the tyrant’s wine” involves his last henchman, Warrant Officer Schrodinger, cutting off his own head and adding his werewolf blood to Alucard’s meal. Why would this matter at all?

Walter seems to understand, because he begs the Major to stop this, as if the Major could.

Desperate, he bisects Alucard with his wires, but it’s already too late for that. Part of the secret behind Alucard’s invincibility is that he gains a 1-up for each person’s blood he consumes. That’s what Anderson and Walter were banking on when they attacked Alucard before. At the time, he had separated himself from the souls he had consumed, which meant that killing him once -- however tough that might be-- would finish him off. But now it’s too late for that. You kill him now and he’ll just come back and dare you to keep going. And he’s taken the blood of like three million people at least.

So the Major observes that Walter’s window of opportunity has closed. According to him, there’s only been two chances to beat Alucard in a fight since Abraham van Helsing captured him in 1898. I assume he’s referring to Anderson and Walter’s respective efforts.

No, Walter was never the final stroke in the Major’s plan, just part of the endgame. All of Millennium’s resources were sacrificed to get to this moment. Enrico Maxwell’s 9th Crusade? The Major was counting on them getting involved, which is probably why he leaked and shared so much of his plans with the Vatican, even though his target was always London. He wanted the Vatican to send all their best warriors to compound the horror, all so Alucard would use his full power to destroy them.

And then, once Alucard’s full power was deployed, the Major knew Anderson would step in and use everything at his disposal to kill Alucard. This battle destroyed all of Alucard’s familiars, setting him up for Walter to take a turn. And maybe Alucard could beat Walter without taking in more blood, but that;s never been Alucard’s style. He sees himself as a loaded weapon at the disposal of Integra Hellsing. He’s not going to drag things out for no reason, and Integra ordered him to destroy Walter, not humor him.

And maybe Walter was aware of all this, but he still believed he could buck the odds and kill Alucard before the Major’s winning move. Walter’s a rook who fancied himself a king. I guess that’s always been his problem. This was never Walter’s story, and I guess he couldn’t handle that truth. If he couldn’t be the hero, then he was content with being the villain, but in the end he was never more than a plot device, supporting whichever side he was on at the time.

And finally, it happens, whatever ‘it’ is. Alucard somehow hears the Major saying that he’s lost. Is the Major saying it? I don’t think anyone else would be. Whoever it is, he starts flashing back to all the other times he’s heard that.

Then he seems to realize something’s gone terribly wrong, and he pauses to notice the rising sun, which has been a common theme with all of his past defeats. Then all these eyes appear on his body and begin winking out, one by one.

Okay, so what the hell happened here? Well, get comfortable, because this is going to take some time to unpack.

The key to all of this is Warrant Officer Schrodinger, a werewolf with the power to be “everywhere and nowhere”. This sounds like he’s just a teleporter, like Nightcrawler from the X-Men, or.... Majik from the X-Men. Well, it’s more complicated than that.

Let me explain the “Schrödinger's cat” thought experiment, because that’s one of those things that’s widespread enough in pop culture that it’s easy to take for granted. I think people understand it has to do with an imaginary cat being alive or dead, but that’s about all.

The really short version of quantum mechanics is that subatomic particles don’t behave the same way as big objects like apples or planets or people. It’s convenient to think of atoms as tiny little solar systems, with electrons orbiting the atomic nucleus. But the reality is that electrons don’t revolve around elliptical orbits like the Earth around the Sun. What happens instead is the electron zips around the nucleus all over the place, from all angles and directions. What’s more, the electron can be at any particular spot at any moment. So it’s less useful to think of an electron having an orbit around a nucleus. What you have instead is this region where the electron is most likely to be at any particular moment. And you can do the math and figure out what the shape of this region is. You can’t locate the electron’s exact position at any particular moment, but you can consider the region where it’s most likely to be in an atom, which will resemble a sphere or a vaguely dumbbell kind of shape.

This is what the Schrödinger Equation is for. Erwin Schrödinger didn’t just talk about cats all day. He postulated his equation in 1925 to work out the movements of electrons in atoms. It was groundbreaking work, and he won a Nobel Prize for it in 1933, and don’t feel bad if you have trouble wrapping your head around all of this. I’m a professional chemist and a lot of this is over my head.

The point of the “Schrödinger's cat” concept was to help visualize how confusing quantum mechanics really is. There are principles to subatomic particles that we know to be true, but they make no sense in our macroscale world. For example, a particle might have a probability of being in multiple locations at a given moment. It can only be in one place at a time, but until you actually perform the measurement to find out, it may as well be in all of those locations. This is something called “superposition”, and I guess we could say that this idea is the basis for our wolfboy’s powers.

So Schrödinger (the scientist, not the furry) suggested a thought experiment where a macroscale event could depend upon a subatomic condition. Like there’s some subatomic thing that could happen or not happen, and depending on the outcome, it would cause a poison to be dispensed that would kill a cat in a box. If the particle goes one way, the cat dies, but if it goes the other way, the cat survives. But both probabilities are equal, and supposedly both outcomes are true for the particle until you make the observation. Therefore, you can’t know whether the cat lived or died until you open the box to look! Indeed, according to quantum mechanics, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead until you open the box to see for yourself.

How does that make any sense? Well it doesn’t, and that’s the point Erwin Schrödinger was driving at. In our large scale, things like gravity and being one place at a time are things we take for granted. But on the quantum level, subatomic particles are governed by rules that seem completely paradoxical to us. And yet, we’re not talking about some alternate reality here. Those subatomic particles make up the atoms that make up us. Cats, boxes, bottles of poison, they’re all just a huge pile of subatomic particles, each following these seemingly nonsensical rules. They’re just organized in such a way that they give rise to bigger rules that make more sense to us. Things like classical mechanics, chemical reactions, cats liking to be inside boxes, and so on. As Erwin Schrödinger put it:

“It is typical of these cases that an indeterminacy originally restricted to the atomic domain becomes transformed into macroscopic indeterminacy, which can then be resolved by direct observation. That prevents us from so naïvely accepting as valid a "blurred model" for representing reality. In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory. There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.”

In other words, we see the world as discrete outcomes. We read the black letters on the page, and not the indeterminate spaces in between, or the hazy, unfinished thoughts of the writer. That doesn’t mean the words on the page aren’t legitimate, or that the passing thoughts of the writer don’t exist. We have to accept the seeming contradiction of it.

So what does this have to do with Alucard? Well, Schrödinger (the furry, not the scientist) has the ability to be like one of these subatomic particles. Our were-boy probably can’t be literally everywhere, but he has this probability region of places where he can be, and it seems to cover at least half the world. He’s appeared in Brazil, London, Zorin Blitz’s psychic visions, and so on. He’s been shot twice in this story, but he just reappears like nothing happened to him at all. It’s not like he teleported away in the nick of time, either. We’ve seen his head burst open like a ripe melon. Like Schrödinger’s cat in the thought experiment, he can be alive or dead at any given moment, so killing him doesn’t actually matter. Warrant Officer Schrödinger can do all of this and he’s conscious of this ability. So as long as he’s aware of himself, he can observe himself and direct himself to be in any location he so chooses.

I would think getting shot in the face would interfere with this ability to control his power, but that’s probably where his werewolf nature comes in. Like the Captain, he can grow back from a nasty headwound, so that gives him time to picture himself someplace else, and in better health. Now that I think about it, that must have been a silver knife he used to cut his own head off.

So when Alucard drank all that blood, he drank Schrödinger’s too, and just like when he drank Rip van Winkle’s blood and got the power to fire that magic musket, Alucard absorbed Schrödinger’s ability to be “everywhere and nowhere”. Except that power only works when Schrödinger himself is conscious of it. And he’s not conscious of it anymore because he’s part of Alucard now. Alucard might figure out how to control this power, but until he does, he can’t choose a location and be in that one place. Instead, he’s “everywhere and nowhere” all the time. So he’s experiencing all of his past moments simultaneously, with no control over his current position.

That sounds bad, right? Well it gets worse. He drank all those other dead people’s blood too, so on top of his own perception, he has the perceptions of all 3 million plus of the souls he’s consumed. So that just further complicates matters. The bottom line is that Schrödinger’s ability is fundamentally incompatible with Alucard’s existence as a composite being made up of multiple absorbed lives.

And since Alucard can’t just cough up Schrödinger’s blood, it’s too late now. He’s got Schrödinger’s ability and he’s stuck with it, but he can’t control it, which means he just winks out of existence. As the Major puts it, he’s now neither live nor dead nor undead. He’s become like a series of imaginary numbers. You’ll need to look that one up on your own time, folks, I spent enough time talking about quantum mechanics.

And you have to hand it to Kouta Hirano, this is a really clever way to bring down an overpowered seinen manga protagonist. This whole time, all of these lower villains acted like they could just beat down Alucard if they applied enough brute force, but that was never going to get the job done. For the purposes of this story, Alucard has been, almost by definition, unbeatable. So the Major’s solution was to give him a new power, one that he would be unable to control. It wouldn’t kill him, but killing Alucard seems like a fool’s errand anyway. Instead, it just... makes Alucard go away, which is probably as close to destroying him as anyone could ever hope for. He might still be alive in some semantic sense, but he can’t carry out his duties to Hellsing and the Crown, so the Major seems to have at least brought down what Alucard is expected to be.

And there’s no way to stop it, because it’s already happened. Integra commands him to stay, but it’s useless. I like the way he signs off in the dub of the OVA, where he apologizes to Integra and says this is one order he cannot obey. It’s just out of his hands.

Then he vanishes, and all that’s left of Alucard is a bloody mark on the street, shaped like the Hellsing insignia on his gloves.

Wait, so does this affect Seras too, since she was Alucard’s servant vampire? Remember, way back in Chapter 1, Integra said that killing the head vampire would automatically kill any ghouls or vampires he creates. So maybe Seras is gone too?

Hell naw. Seras joins Integra in the Major’s command center, and she looks like she’s ready for some revenge. Does she know what’s just happened? I mean, she was furious at the Major to begin with, but she sensed Alucard’s return a while back when he floated up the Thames River. Surely she sensed her own vampire dad winking out of existence.

Meanwhile, Walter had a front-row seat for Alucard’s disappearance. At first he laughs with triumph. I guess he must be giddy with relief, since he wanted to kill Alucard, and for a minute there it looked like Alucard had him dead to rights. Imagine a guy’s about to murder you and then he just ceases to exist. But it doesn’t take long for Walter to realize how hollow this all is. He wanted to kill Alucard himself, and he bet everything just to get that one opportunity, and now he’s failed and he’ll never get another chance. His body is giving out and he’s betrayed everyone who ever cared about him and he’s got nothing to show for it.

Then Heinkel starts shooting at him with a sniper rifle. Yeah, she never left the battlefield after Walter killed Yumiko. The Captain stopped her from interfering before, but the Captain’s dead now and I guess she figures she’s got nothing to lose by trying again. And I suppose the sniper act proves she’s learned from Yumiko’s fatal mistake. Attacking Walter up close is dangerous.

At first, Walter seems to invite this. He even invites Heinkel to shoot him a few more times, as it’s a fitting punishment for a traitor. If you’ve only seen the TFS Abridged version of Hellsing, they actually use this as Walter’s death scene, but in the original version Walter takes a few bullets and then leaves. He says Heinkel can shoot him, but she doesn’t get to kill him. I don’t think she even heard him say that, but whatever.

Instead, he uses his wires to board the Major’s airship one last time.

So remember how the Major was protected from Integra by a reinforced glass barrier? Yeah, well Seras finds an 88mm cannon and shoots through it. It also shoots through the hull of his ship and rings a large bell on the outskirts of town. Right before she shoots, Integra orders Seras to “Search and Destroy” just like she always told Alucard. It’s kind of sad, but Seras has automatically succeeded her master as Integra’s weapon. I mean, it’s a triumph for Seras, but it comes at a heavy price for her. She’s probably too enraged by what’s happened to appreciate this moment on all these other levels, but there’ll be time for that.

So there’s no way the Major could survive a cannon like that at pointblank range, right? Wrong, the dude’s a fucking cyborg, and I guess Seras’ aim was a little off. I suppose the downside to using big-ass guns is that you have trouble aiming at small targets. Wait, no, what happened to all that “third eye” stuff from before? What’s wrong with you, Victoria?

Oh wait, she missed because she’s sad. Aw... :`(

So we knew the Major had to be something to have survived this long without aging, but we had already learned he wasn’t a vampire. He insists that he is still human, however, no different from a man with a pacemaker or an artificial limb. His mind remains his own, even if it should be a brain in a life support system or backed up on a computer. I’m not sure if either of these describes the status of the Major’s brain, but to his point, it doesn’t really matter. He describes himself as Alucard’s polar opposite. While Al is this beautiful monster who masquerades as a human, the Major is a human who resembles the grotesque form of a monster. I’m not body-shaming the dude, I’m just reporting what he’s saying. He’s taken a few fat jokes in stride, and I guess he’s got the same attitude about his cyborg body too. He doesn’t seem to care if others find this unpleasant, because it’s better than being a vampire with a diluted self.

Arguably, this whole campaign to destroy Alucard was the Major’s effort to prove his claim on being human. Alucard often said that only a human could defeat a monster like him, and the Major beat him, so doesn’t that prove he’s a human in the end?

So Integra whips out her other gun, the one she didn’t use to shoot at the Major’s glass case, and they start shooting each other at pointblank range. The Major’s a terrible shot, though, and yet somehow he manages to take out one of Integra’s eyes before she puts a bullet in his forehead. I still don’t understand how you can shoot someone in the eye and not kill them. Did the bullet just angle away from her brain or is the Major’s gun just really weak on stopping power?

Anyway, Integra’s shot kills the Major, but not right away, so I guess it’s not just his original brain in there. He’s just thrilled to have finally hit something after a lifetime of terrible marksmanship. It’s a fitting reflection of his win over Alucard, because he and the rest of Millennium were warriors who had never won a war before. In the end, I’m not sure the Major would have been disappointed if his plan had failed. He’d never won before, so I don’t think another defeat would have bothered him much. As it is, he dies contentedly, satisfied with his “good war”. What a shithead.

So yeah, we’ve got three more chapters to go and then we’re done. See you next time.

#2021hellsingliveblog #hellsing #alucard #seras victoria #sir integra hellsing #walter c dornez #the major #heinkel wolfe #warrant officer schrodinger #erwin schrödinger #uh... yeah #that's everybody #starting to run a little low on characters now

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url-is-url · 3 years ago

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Can you please talk more about valerie red huntress symbiote au ? Just general thoughts on how it would work ? I know barely anything about Venom but imagine valerie would get the symbiote from Axion Labs.

OH GOD OH NO OH GOD OH NO I DIDN'T MEAN FOR THIS TO BE AN AU I JUST WANTED TO DUNK ON BUTCH HARTMAN AND HIS PLAGIARIZING HABIT AND MY VENOM OBSESSION

First of all: I will be referring to the symbiote as Venom, a la movie canon, because I have a deep and passionate loathing for the past three years of Venom comic canon, do not get me started on this because I will not be able to stop.

Okay firstly: YES Venom totally comes from Axion Labs. I have not watched Danny Phantom since it was actually airing so I'm definitely checking the ole wiki as I write this but apparently Axion Labs was its own thing and then VladCo bought it? Idk how Venom got to Axion Labs, but it got there and the scientists were like "idk wtf to do with this" and just sorta. Put it in a drawer with a label that says "weird space goo" and forgot about it. (That is VERY MUCH a thing that happens in science labs you would not BELIEVE the shit you can run into if you start poking around old storage objects in labs.) And then VladCo buys Axion, and Intern Valerie is helping organize things and she finds the jar of lost space goo. Idk what happens after that; maybe she determines it's some flavor of alive and passes it to Vlad under the assumption that it's a Weird Space Ghost, maybe she drops it and Venom escapes and bonds with her. I don't know, the details of how they get together aren't important IMO, the important part is the interactions between symbiote and host.

Valerie is still in high school and this is very important to me. Depending on what you do and don't consider canon, Venom is between several thousand and six hundred million years old. Depending on what you do and don't consider canon, Venom has BEEN TO EARTH BEFORE! I am of the opinion that Venom is actually extremely knowledgeable about physics and chemistry and other like, not-Earth-specific things, because they're old as balls. So imagine you're in high school and you're in AP World learning about the Vikings, and you hear this bass-ass voice in your head go actually it wasn't like that at all and suddenly you're RELIVING some other creature's memories of fighting Vikings. Or you're in high school and you're in biology watching a video about octopus camouflage and this voice in your head goes we can do that too and your arm turns "invisible". Imagine you're on your period and you ran out of Advil and you think to yourself "I swear to god if this lunch line doesn't move faster I'm gonna eat the kid in front of me" and the voice in your head goes no, eat the one behind you, he looks juicier LIKE WHAT THE FUCK

Valerie and Venom get together way after Danny becomes Phantom. So Valerie has this huge crush on Danny, but then she also hates Phantom's guts. Venom has senses that humans don't so they can tell that Fenton is Phantom, and Venom regrets their life choices re:bonding with a human, because oh no, these bald apes are so fucking stupid. Every day Venom considers informing Valerie about the secret identity thing. Every day Venom remembers that Phantom's ghostly wail is extremely deadly to them specifically. Every day Venom does not tell Valerie about the secret identity thing.

Most of town is probably at least a little convinced that the huntress is some sort of weirdass ghost, because humans aren't that big. I headcanon Valerie as being short but muscular as hell, around 5'4". Venomized Valerie? Pushing 7' and built like Athena. People assuming she's a weirdass ghost pisses Valerie off SO MUCH, and it pisses Venom off too though for different reasons (I AM TAKING VERY GOOD CARE OF MY HOST SHE IS ONE HUNDRED PERCENT ALIVE I AM INSULTED BY YOUR INSINUATIONS THAT SHE IS IN ANY WAY DECEASED)

Oh hey wait, if Venom can tell the Dannys are the same person, Venom can also tell that the Vlads are the same person. Vlad has never demonstrated anything along the lines of a ghostly wail, so his secret identity is NOT safe and Venom tells Valerie what's what. Valerie is so disturbed, but then she decides to give Vlad the Homophobic Rich Grandpa treatment and pretends to go along with what he wants so she can get that sweet sweet tech, then she turns right around and does whatever she wants when he's not looking. Maybe Venom (as in the big lady) and Red Huntress are assumed to be two different people because Valerie works for Vlad as Red but then does her own stuff as Venom?

Carnage. Oh god, Carnage. So, the Carnage symbiote (often referred to as Red, I love a coinkydink) is Venom's offspring. In the comics, it is possible for a host to experience sympathetic morning sickness and shit in advance of the symbiote spawning. Please imagine you're in high school in a small town, and you are nauseous as fuck and having weird dreams and cannot eat enough chocolate (chocolate is a good source of phenylthylamine, which is a neurotransmitter that symbiotes need to eat) and one of your shitty high school friends goes "omg are you PREGNANT" and you know that whatever you say, everybody in the universe is gonna hear it. You've never had sex in your life but you still have a moment of panic like OH GOD AM I THE NEXT VIRGIN MARY SHIT and then your body roommate is like actually, this one's on me. DO YOU LOSE YOUR WHOLE GODDAMN MIND OR DO YOU LOSE YOUR WHOLE GODDAMN MIND. "wait Venom I thought you were a guy" "why would you think that i have a concept of gender" "...your voice is deep?" "humans are so fucking stupid"

The big weaknesses of symbiotes are fire and certain frequencies of sound. Venom is scared shitless of Ember McClain, send tweet.

There's a re-appearing ghost who hosted Venom when they were alive. This could be a canon character or an OC. Either way, the interactions maximally play up the "awkward ex" thing.

A better source of the phenylthylamine Venom needs to live is BRAINS. This is now a ghost hunger AU also and Valerie catches Phantom noshing on like, a ghost deer or something. Cue Venom SEE IF HE CAN DO IT WHY CAN'T WE

Hey Venom's an alien who is old as balls, it's called the INFINITE REALMS, there's probably LOTS of alien ghosts with opinions about symbiotes

One day Phantom gets hurt really badly and Valerie feels bad enough to go save his ass (if only because the only person that gets to kill Phantom is HER tyvm). Venom is very Exasperated Parent about all of these fool human children so they just. Pick him up by the scruff like a disgruntled kitten and drag him to safety.

Venom has a very, very low opinion of the Doctors Fenton. Venom knows one (1) thing about humans and that is Protecc The Children and these morons are continuously shooting at their own child. The only reason Venom has not eaten them is because a) Valerie insists that humans are off menu and b) Danny's ghostly wail is scary. Also the only competent ghost hunters in this town seem to be Sam, Tucker, Danny, Jazz, and Valerie. Valerie why are the only competent people in this town children. "i wish i FUCKIN KNEW"

I'm now headcanoning that Valerie has a Very Southern grandma or auntie just to have an excuse for Venom to learn Very Southern expressions. Please imagine doing something stupid and the alien that lives in your brain stem just goes "oh bless your heart". Please imagine that some asshole yoinked the whole town into the Ghost Zone again and the alien that lives in your brain stem is like "dear jesus give me patience" I just think that would be funny.

#please don't ask me to talk about venom i will not be able to stop a;lskdjfsa;lkdfj

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anamelessfacelessnerd · 4 years ago

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Not me rewriting the ending to Mizumono only to have a much better idea halfway through so as soon as I finished the first one I started on the second

Rating: Explicit

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: M/M

Fandom: Hannibal (TV)

Relationship: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter

Characters: Will Graham, Hannibal Lecter, Abigail Hobbs

Additional Tags: Canon-Typical Violence, Episode: s02e13 Mizumono, Smut, Anal Sex, Anal Fingering, Mild Blood, Rough Sex, Coming Untouched, Not Beta Read, Dark Will Graham

Language: English

Summary: “I need him to know.” Will looked into Hannibal’s eyes then, searching for the desperation he could hear in his words. “If I confessed to Jack Crawford now, you think he would forgive me?”

“I would forgive you.” It’s clear that Hannibal’s not talking about the murder, but the betrayal. He would still forgive Will for conspiring against him. “If Jack were to tell you all is forgiven, Will, would you accept his forgiveness?” The double meaning is apparent. Hannibal was asking Will if he would go with him knowing that Hannibal would forgive him. It’s an invitation. One that Will wasn’t sure he wanted to decline.

“Jack isn't offering forgiveness.” Hannibal wanted to say “I am”, but he didn't. “He wants justice. He wants to see you. See who you are. See who I've become. Know the truth.” Will takes another sip of his wine and Hannibal accepts his defeat. He really hadn’t wanted to hurt Will, but it seemed that it would be the only option.

“Still, I suppose we don’t owe Jack that do we?” Will spoke again.

Notes: Okay, I know I rewrote the ending of Mizumono yesterday, but I had this idea while I wrote it and I couldn't help myself.

“Do you know what an imago is, Will?” Hannibal asked.

“It's a flying insect,” Will replied.

“It's the final stage of a transformation. Maturity.”

“When you become who you will be,” Will said, catching on to the point Hannibal was making.

“It's also a term from the dead religion of psychoanalysis. An imago is an image of a loved one buried in the unconscious, carried with us all our lives.”

“An ideal.”

“The concept of an ideal always searching for an objective reality to match. I have a concept of you just as you have a concept of me.”

“Neither of us are ideal,” Will says after taking a long drink of his wine. Hannibal considered what Will had just said for a moment. He had nearly trusted an ideal. He thought that Will would leave with him until he smelled Freddie Lounds on him. Perhaps Will was right, neither of them were ideal.

“We are both too curious about too many things for any ideals.” Hannibal paused a moment, feeling a twinge of hesitation for what he was about to ask. It was completely out of character for Hannibal to grovel, but in recent weeks he had grown accustomed to the idea of running away with Will, and he wasn’t quite ready to give the fantasy up. “Is it ideal that Jack die?”

Will matched Hannibal’s pause. Most would not even notice the hesitation, but Hannibal did.

“It's necessary. What happens to Jack has been preordained.” Will’s voice was cold, free from any emotion. In any other circumstance Hannibal would be proud of how well he schooled his expression, but now it just frustrated him.

“We could disappear now. Tonight. Feed your dogs. Leave a note for Dr. Bloom, never see her or Jack Crawford again. Almost polite,” Hannibal was nearly begging now and Will knew it. Their eyes locked and at once Will understood. Hannibal knew and he was willing to forgive.

“That'd make this our last supper,” Will said, considering Hannibal’s offer. Now, just days away from the sting that he and Jack had planned, Will still wasn’t sure whose side he was really on. Part of him wanted to be good, he wanted to atone for his sins and clear his name for good, because even though he had been acquitted, there were still those who believed he had actually killed all those people.

The other part of him wanted to become what everyone thought him to be. Though he hated to admit it, he had felt a thrill as he killed and mutilated Randall Tier. Even worse was that now thinking about that feeling didn’t make him feel guilty or sick, only enhanced the adrenaline.

If he was being completely honest, half of the thrill was seeing how Hannibal looked at him when he knew what Will had done. The subtle adoration and pride that he was no doubt allowing Will to see. Hannibal’s gaze made Will feel things, things that he had never felt with anyone before, and he wanted to chase that feeling.

“Of this life. I am serving lamb.”

“Sacrificial? Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Will snorted.

“I freely claim my sin. I don't need a sacrifice. Do you?”

“I need him to know.” Will looked into Hannibal’s eyes then, searching for the desperation he could hear in his words. “If I confessed to Jack Crawford now, you think he would forgive me?”

“I would forgive you.” It’s clear that Hannibal’s not talking about the murder, but the betrayal. He would still forgive Will for conspiring against him. “If Jack were to tell you all is forgiven, Will, would you accept his forgiveness?” The double meaning was apparent. Hannibal was asking Will if he would go with him knowing that Hannibal would forgive him. It’s an invitation. One that Will wasn’t sure he wanted to decline.

“Still, I suppose we don’t owe Jack that do we?” Will spoke again. Hannibal perked up almost imperceptibly.

“Perhaps a note will be sufficient. I didn’t want to leave the dogs alone, but they’ll be fine for a while. Knowing Jack he’ll send a cruiser to my place within an hour after I don’t show up in the morning.”

“Let us prepare then. I would like to be out of the country before Jack realizes that you are no longer his man on the inside.” Hannibal stood and began gathering plates to bring to the kitchen because of course he would want to leave the house spotless. Will helped him with the dishes and wiping everything down. They caught eyes several times, both revving with the anticipation of what was to come. Will considered apologizing for his conspiracy, but when he looked into Hannibal’s eyes he knew he was already forgiven.

It was a little intoxicating to know that he had this kind of control over hannibal. To know that he made Hannibal beg. He wondered how else he could compel him to beg. That was, once they stopped dancing around the physical aspect of their relationship and finally just fucked like they both wanted to.

Once they were finished they retired to the study to write a note. Hannibal wandered around, collecting particular books and knick knacks that he wanted to bring while Will drafted a note. After much thinking and many balled up pieces of paper, Will finally got it right. When he finished, he handed it to Hannibal to read.

“This will do nicely,” Hannibal said. He slipped the letter into an envelope and sealed it with blood red wax and a stamp that bore his initials.

Will watched as the wax dripped. The flow of the thick liquid was giving him all sorts of dirty thoughts. Thoughts of Hannibal pouring that warm liquid all over his body. Thoughts of being covered in other kinds of red liquid. Will had to take a deep breath to steady himself and bring some blood back up to his head.

When the wax had dried, Hannibal handed the letter to Will, fingers brushing against Will’s skin tenderly.

“I have a surprise for you,” Hannibal said, hand coming to grip Will’s wrist.

“Oh?” Will replied.

“Come with me.” Hannibal led Will upstairs, never letting go of his wrist. Will had only been to the upper floor of Hannibal’s house a few times, and never in the dark, so he didn’t really know where they were going. He had two ideas, one much more enticing than the other, but both equally likely.

As it turned out, neither of his assumptions were correct. Hannibal led him to a closed door at the end of the hallway and knocked.

“May we come in?” He asked. Will didn’t even have time to question who was in there before the door was being opened from the inside. Standing in the doorway was none other than Abigail Hobbs.

“Hi Will,” She said, a small smile playing on her chapped lips.

“Abigail?” Will asked, voice barely audible. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Had Hannibal drugged him? Was he hallucinating?

“How are you here? You’re dead,” Will said.

“Not dead, just misplaced,” Hannibal replied, “they never found a body, well, not a whole body at least. It was merely a charade.”

Abigail tucked her hair back to show Will the flesh where her ear had been. It was healed over by now, but it still brought a wave of bile up in Will’s throat.

“You’ve been here this whole time?” Will asked, choking down the anger that was building in him. There was no sense getting angry now, especially when he was teetering on the edge of a new beginning.

“I’m sorry,” Abigail said, tears welling in her eyes.

“I forgive you,” Will said. Abigail took two big steps forward and wrapped her arms around Will’s middle, burying her tears in his shirt. He brought a hand to her hair and stroked, both soothing her and assuring himself that she was really there and really alive.

“Thank you,” Will whispered to Hannibal. He wasn’t sure what he was thanking him for. Maybe for keeping Abigail alive, maybe for bringing him to her, maybe just because he didn’t know what else to say.

Hannibal’s hand came to rest between Will’s shoulder blades, fingertips shooting electricity down his spine.

“I do not wish to rush you two, but we must be going,” Hannibal said, “there is still much for us to do and little time to do it.”

Abigail pulled back from Will and wiped her eyes on her sleeve, sniffling a few times.

“Will, would you care to help me pack?” Hannibal asked.

“Yeah, sure.” Will cast one last glance at Abigail before following Hannibal to his bedroom.

“Everything in that top drawer must come,” Hannibal said as he set a large suitcase on the bed. Will began transferring the carefully folded garments from the dresser to the suitcase while Hannibal sorted through his suits to find the ones he liked best.

Will and Hannibal's hands brushed for what felt like the 500th time that night as they both attempted to place clothing in the suitcase at the same time. Their eyes met and there was a moment of contemplation before they pounced.

Will dragged Hannibal to the floor and straddled him, hands balling up around fistfulls of Hannibal’s jacket as he pressed their lips together. Hannibal kissed back with equal fervour, hands sliding back to cup Will’s ass. Will moaned into the kiss and rutted his hips against Hannibals. Hannibal bit Will’s lip, not stopping until he drew blood.

They broke away, panting and breathing each other in. Hannibal brought one hand to Will’s cheek and stroked, the pad of his thumb brushing over Will’s parted lips. Will sucked the digit into his mouth, tongue lapping at the sensitive skin.

Will ground his hips down, ass rubbing against Hannibal’s rapidly hardening cock. The older man stared up at him in wonder, lips parted and eyes blown wide. He withdrew his hand, swiping his thumb along the bleeding cut on Will’s lip until the skin was stained red. Then he brought it to his own mouth, his eyes rolling back as he savored the metallic taste of his lover’s blood.

“You taste divine Will,” Hannibal said, deep voice sending tremors through Will’s body. That was it, that was the breaking point for Will.

“Take your fucking clothes off,” He demanded as he scrambled off of Hannibal to remove his own clothes.

“Such crass language,” Hannibal scolded, clicking his tongue disapprovingly, “whatever should I do about that?”

Hannibal was trying his best to regain some of the power he had lost in this exchange. Will would let him believe that he did, if only to sate his ego, but Will knew deep down that he was in control. He had known since before Hannibal had pleaded with him that he was in control here. Hannibal had several layers to his persona. The first was the polite, yet slightly eccentric doctor who loved good food and opera, behind that was the calculating psychopath cold, and emotionless. His true personality was hidden deep within himself, but Will was able to see it, after all, he had not yet met a person he couldn’t read.

The person that Hannibal truly was was driven by his emotions. Anger and hurt bubbled under his skin, suppressed by years of burying everything akin to a feeling deep below the surface. He was intensely narcissistic and hedonistic. Everything he did was to fulfill his desires. He ate to satiate his hunger, he killed to assuage a compulsion. He acted solely in his own self interests, and right now Will was his interest. That gave Will ultimate power over Hannibal. He wanted Will in every sense of the word, and would do nearly everything to have him.

Perhaps what solidified Will’s control was the fact that he was aware of this while Hannibal wasn’t. Hannibal had spent so much effort repressing feelings that he genuinely believed that they were never there in the first place. Will knew about Hannibal’s nature, not from the beginning, no he was fooled like everyone else at first, but certainly longer than he let on. He only raised the issue with Jack when he was in danger.

Will put on the facade of being overly emotional, of being unstable, but deep down he was something different entirely. That’s why he was so good at “faking” the coldness he showed with Hannibal, it was never fake, the emotions were fake, and Hannibal was none the wiser. This was Will’s game and Hannibal was barely aware he was playing.

“Will?” Hannibal asked, pulling Will from his thoughts. He kneeled in front of him, now fully nude, his erection jutting out proudly from a bed of well trimmed blonde curls.

“Fuck me,” Will insisted, trying to pass his momentary spacyness off as fascination with the admittedly impressive cock that hung between Hannibal’s legs.

“As you wish.” Yes, as Will wishes. Hannibal will do exactly as Will wishes.

Will doesn’t wait for any more negotiations. He turns around and sinks to his elbows, thighs spread wide to accommodate Hannibal. He heard the older man’s breath catch as Will displayed himself.

“Oh Will, you truly are exquisite. Beauty incarnate.” Hannibal mused. Will watched between his legs as Hannibal reached into the bedside table for a bottle of lube. Hannibal poured the lube onto his fingers, then pressed them to Will’s hole, tracing the rim to get it nice and wet.

Will buried his face in his crossed arms to stifle a moan. The last thing he needed was for Hannibal to know exactly how sensitive he actually was and to exploit that fact. They didn’t have much time and Will was really just looking to be fucked.

Finally, one finger breached Will. It slid in with little resistance and Hannibal added a second. His thumb came to press against Will’s perineum as he scissored his fingers. Will let out a choked sob when Hannibal’s other hand tangled in his hair and pulled his head up sharply.

“I want to hear you Will. I want to hear exactly how much you like this.”

“God, just fuck me already Hannibal,” Will begged, “I’m ready, just get in me.”

Hannibal withdrew his fingers at once. Will didn’t even have a chance to get a word out before Hannibal was pressing his cock inside.

“There you go sweet boy, taking my cock so well, like you were made for it. Like you were born to take me.”

Will had never heard Hannibal speak so lewdly before, but he liked it more than he would ever care to admit. Not that he even could right now with Hannibal thrusting into him with punishing force, hitting his prostate every time.

Hannibal still had one hand in Will’s hair. The other was gripping his hip so tight he would undoubtedly have finger shaped bruises in the morning. He brought his lips down to Will’s shoulder, placing a few gentle kisses there, and that would simply not do. Will needed him to be rough, he needed to be fucked hard.

“Harder,” Will grunted, “come on Hannibal, you can do better than that. Do it like I know you want to. Hurt me.”

“Are you sure you can handle it?” Hannibal panted.

“Fuck yes, give it to be Hannibal, fucking ruin me.”

Hannibal complied immediately, using all of the force he could to pound into Will like he was trying to split him clean in half. He bit down hard on Will’s shoulder, just short of drawing blood.

Will rocked back to meet every thrust, letting out a litany of pathetic noises that he probably should have been embarrassed about. Hannibal was groaning now too, grunting like a beast in Will’s ear as he shoved in impossibly deeper.

Will’s orgasm was so sudden, he didn’t even feel it coming. In an instant his body went rigid as white hot pleasure coiled in his abdomen and he came completely untouched.

After coming for what felt like hours, he dropped to the floor, thighs shaking too hard to support himself any longer.

Once he had caught his breath, Will rolled over onto his back and spread his legs.

“Keep going,” he told Hannibal, “I want you to use me to make yourself come.”

Hannibal didn’t need to be told twice before sliding back into Will. He hoisted the younger man’s knees up over his shoulders to get a better angle as he slammed in over and over again.

At last, Hannibal gave a final hard thrust and spilled inside Will, coating his insides with his seed. He pulled out and laid on the floor next to him, breathing hard and trembling.

“I would have run away with you a long time ago if I had known that was in store for me,” Will panted, struggling to sit up.

“If I saw you every day, forever, Will, I would remember this time,” Hannibal said, reaching over to brush a lock of curly hair behind his ear.

Will smiled and kissed Hannibal again. It was softer this time, full of much more affection, especially on Hannibal’s behalf.

“I would sit here with you for eternity Will, but I fear that we must leave soon. We would not want to keep Abigail waiting.” Hannibal said when they pulled away.

“Of course, but first will you promise me something?”

“What is it that you desire?”

“Do that again as soon as we get to wherever we’re going.” Hannibal grinned and cupped Will’s cheek.

“I would gladly have you every day, my dear Will.”

Notes: Listen, we all know who's actually in control and this relationship and it's not Hannibal "Simp" Lecter.

#hannibal #hannigram #hannibal lecter #will graham #abigail hobbs #smut #fanfic #ao3 #hannigram fic #hannibal fanfiction #mizumono #2.13

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postmodernmulticoloredcloak · 5 years ago

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Some thoughts about SteveBucky (and why it was deliberate in the CATFA and CATWS narrative)

As you might know, nowadays my approach to the MCU canon is pretty much on the lines of, the movies are Kevin Feige’s shitty fanfiction of a concept that could have been good and was attempted at intervals at the beginning at various levels but not executed, and the story and the characters are just suggestions I can play with in my mental sandbox.

But occasionally I like to listen to the Captain America: The Winter Soldier soundtrack to remember how it felt to be in love with that movie, and today that got me in the kind of mood where I am actually convinced that bisexual Steve and SteveBucky as a romantic dynamic were in fact written deliberately into the narrative, or, better, are structural elements of the narrative, because the emotional narrative is structurally made of parallels between the relationship between Steve and Peggy - the relationship of the past - and the relationship between Steve and Bucky - the relationship of the future - and it’s all too architectural in the narrative to not be deliberate.

In particular today I’ve been thinking about pictures. There’s the obvious parallel between the way the 40s story in CATFA and the body of CATWS end, one with Peggy looking at a picture of Steve before his transformation from a SSR file, while Howard tries to help by going looking for Steve, one with Steve looking at a picture of Bucky before his transformation from a Hydra file, while Sam offers to help go looking for him. But I’ve also been thinking about the scene in the Smithsonian in CATWS, and what the infamous picture of Peggy in the compass was about in that scene.

We assume that the compass was the only relevant object Steve had on himself when he crashed the plane and this was found; someone from Shield must have been, here we found this on you, take it back. Basically, it’s Steve’s only belonging in his new life. But here’s the irony: it’s a picture of a person (the only person of Steve’s smallest circle of people close to him) who is actually still alive.

The movie juxtaposes Steve’s visit to Peggy, alive and changed by time, to Steve’s visit to the secular altar to Bucky in the exhibition, crystallized in the past. It’s in fact an interesting detail that, in the museum scene, we only see pictures or wordless footage of Bucky, while we see footage of Peggy where she speaks; she has a voice in both the museum and real life, while Bucky doesn’t have a voice--we literally meet him masked and muted. (Peggy’s responsibility in what happened to Bucky, as the director of the organization Hydra flourished as a parasite of, is a potential the third Captain America movie could have tapped into, if they’d actually decided to make a third Captain America movie. RIP Captain America 3, we’ll never forget you. But this is is not relevant to this post.)

So, Peggy has lived - she has grown older, she physically carries the signs of the time she’s lived through, and even the footage in the museum shows her slightly older than we left her in the first movie, and in color, a deliberate emphasis that the footage was taken later than the time Steve left; Bucky, on the other hand, is unchanged, both in the museum and in real life. In the museum, assumed dead, he’s “frozen” in images from the past (in black and white); in real life, he’s literally been frozen to the point he’s not aged much.

Steve carries a black and white picture of Peggy with him, inside his compass, and the scene compares it with the footage - from a later time, in color, in motion, where Peggy has a voice. That Peggy from the compass is dead to Steve, and he mourns her just like he mourns the man whose black and white images are shown at the museum.

Except that the picture in the compass is something he can mourn privately; it’s, as we said, his only belonging. In fact, it’s ironic that he now has a picture of Peggy, and no one else. In the first movie, we see why: Steve and the Howling Commandoes went on missions on the frontlines of the war, Peggy belonged with the strategic command of the army. So Steve would keep a picture of her to remember her by as they were apart - it would make no sense for him to keep a picture of Bucky, because Bucky was there with him. It’s ironic because Bucky sees the picture and is jealous, but the point is that Steve doesn’t need a picture to remember him by when they’re together.

Of course, Bucky’s presumed death parts them. And Steve finds himself with no pictures of Bucky with him, and needs to visit the museum to mourn him in front of images of him. And this is an interesting point because Steve can mourn past Peggy privately - as he owns the compass with her picture, something that belongs to him and no one else has access to - but he cannot mourn Bucky privately, because he owns no object that connect him to Bucky, so he needs to go to a public place to be able to see an image of him.

In order to mourn Bucky properly, in front of a memorial of him, he is forced to do it in a place that not only is public, but is actually a place where his personal history is treated like a museum curiosity to put on display for everyone to consume.

There’s something deeply poignant in the fact that he hides, that he pretends to be someone else, in order to mourn his deceased male companion - the scene emphasizes that Steve does not want to be recognized, and the metaphor of him hiding his real identity to have an emotional moment regarding Bucky is not so subtle. (Yes, there is material of Peggy in the Smithsonian scene but the scene contains Steve’s visit to Bucky in parallel to Steve’s visit to Peggy in person, so I feel authorized to read the scene as mostly a visit to Bucky, especially since at the end of the movie Bucky also visits his own memorial there, emphasizing the cruciality of that picture in the narrative.)

In fact, the whole hidden identity to visit Bucky thing is not accidental because later, when he needs to confront Bucky, he steals his old uniform from the same exhibition: before finding out about Bucky, he wears incognito clothes to hide his identity, after finding out about Bucky, he reclaims a powerful sign of that identity - the uniform he wore when he fought alongside Bucky - basically breaking it out of the closet. It’s not a coincidence that earlier in the movie he wears a monochrome uniform meant to be unseen, either: the movie plays a lot on secrecy and openness regarding Steve’s identity, and the pivotal element in this narrative is Bucky. Steve reclaims his identity in parallel to trying to give Bucky’s identity back to him. It is a movie about identity and closets after all.

To go back to something I mentioned earlier, you have the contrast of the black-and-white picture of Peggy in the compass with the in-color, speaking, living Peggy; and that contrast highlights the deep difference between the two, because Peggy has lived a long life and grown older and changed. And then you have the contrast between the black-and-white picture of Bucky in the museum with the living Bucky, and in this case the parallel shows how little Bucky has actually been allowed to change, he’s been frozen in time, allowed no voice, allowed no change, no motion.

Steve, unlike Peggy, hasn’t gotten to live his life, but has been frozen in time, like Bucky. Shared life experience and all that jazz...

These fuckers (writers? directors? I don’t know) had the idea of writing two love interests for the titular character and framing the m/f relationship as the relationship of the past, and the m/m relationship as the relationship of the future, as one does, and built the emotional narrative on parallels between the two, and everything was fun and games until Disney Marvel ruined it all because they realized, I suppose. I mean, no, not everything was fun and games because things could have been written a lot better especially in regards of *gasp* female characters, that rarely work in the hands of misogynistic writers, but the two movies, with varying degrees of success, did something interesting (the theme of masculinity in CATFA is so fascinating) that was nice as long as it lasted. At least I’ll be thinking this until I get enraged at some shit they said and change my mind again. #saladforbucky

As always you’re welcome to share thoughts, questions, comments, whatever.

#my mcu thoughts #catfa #catws #steve x peggy #steve x bucky #stucky #stevebucky #idek #mcu

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oh-nxts-and-bxlts · 3 years ago

Note

Shadow meme- Diggy how do you really feel about being an old, rusting model?

For a solid moment, the shadow doesn't appear to react to the question, staring at its source with a sort of numb emptiness in its soulless optics. It looks distinctly alien- like a chalk doodle floating into a vaguely person-shaped void just big enough to contain it, the brittle white lines giving it a proper shape fuzzing and trembling like snow static.

"...What's with that moronic question? Can ya' not compute a concept as simple as the fear of death? Is that why ya' feel the need to ask me this stupid question, you maladapted waste of carbon?" The negative imprint buzzes, voiced charged with a grating, faint static and a sense of seething bitterness. Then, it sits down - seemingly onto nothing, crossing one leg above the other, and resting its chin into her palm. It doesn't emote, doesn't really seem to change its expression - it just stares.

"Then again, there's a little more to it than that. Not that I'd expect your limited brainpower to grasp it. So, for the sake of enlightening the class, I'll bite. To make an organic, if somewhat accurate analogy, it's like being on perpetual death row." The shadow taps a finger against its chin, producing a jarring, off sound of metal on metal. It's too high-pitched, too sharp, far too loud. "You know you'll die. You know you'll die soon-ish - but you don't know when or why exactly. That decision isn't in your hands, and it never was. I would've made a cancer anaology, but in that case, there's no one to blame for your immediate demise."

"Here though, ah' know who has the finger over the kill switch, and even if I can tell when it'll happen, ah' can't predict it with one hundred percent certainty. Ah' can try to think about something else - and I do, otherwise the point of being alive at all becomes a little less than nothing. But it's constantly there, gnawing, buzzing, screaming at the back of my mind."

"...Bein' old in general has its own set of drawbacks too. Ya've been around the block, ya' know how the system works. Ya' also know how little it values your life and that of others. Ya' learn ta' be smart, ta' not make the mistakes others died for - ya' live a little longer. Your prize? Another day of trying to live a little longer. It's an endless sequence of watching people in charge, HUMANS, make the same mistakes over and over again. Ya' could never hope ta' reach or sway them, since they don't see you as worth much of anything, especially as ya' get older. Ya' just pay for their nonsense instead. Nothing ya' do objectively changes much of anything. Ya' just have to ride it out. It's that or lying down and dying."

#ask meme #bionicparrot

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flickeringart · 4 years ago

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Fire and Air

As functions of the psyche

Fire is commonly associated with spirit. For some, ”spirit” seems too abstract to even begin to grasp. It’s essentially the thing that is life and gives life at the same time. It makes things show up and it is the thing that shows up simultaneously. It takes things into being and it is the being at the same time. Fire is the presence of life and the meaning it carries through its forms (which includes the absence of meaning). For something to ”be” it has to come alive in consciousness and it’s this phenomena that fire is a symbol of.

There’s a strong sense of ”being life” in fiery individuals which comes with all the positive attributes of warmth, passion, confidence, enthusiasm, bravery, creativity, leadership and authority. They view life in terms of symbolic meaning, which is different from viewing life in terms of literal function, which is more characteristic of earth. It’s also different from experiencing life through emotion, which is characteristic of water. Emotions have no higher purpose or inherent meaning when taken out of a fiery context. Water is the animating force, which means that it is experiential rather than symbolic. Since it’s purely experiential it is undifferentiated which allows for no more than what is felt. What is felt is a fact, but it has no context. Context is ultimately provided through the air element, which I will get to.

In astrology, fire dominant people are often described as being willing to head out on adventures, take risks and live like they are demi-gods of sorts. This is because they are in touch with the spirit of life – not the experience, the concept or the function of life. The force, or ”fire” if you will, is not a definable substance; it’s the implication and the presence of each form and phenomenon. Generosity is another thing that is usually associated with fire people. They can give because they usually don’t feel a sense of pressing lack. A gift is a symbol and is immortal in essence – it carries power because of the intention put into it. To contrast, from an earthy perspective a gift has a literal function (of utility and sensation) and is consequently stripped of its godliness. It is plain materia that is used for its physical properties and nothing more. Of course, in real life individuals are not made up of one element, but it’s effective to exemplify in this way.

Life of fire dominant individuals is, from their perspective, a fascinating enfoldment of a story. They’re not merely bodies that are born and clothed, moved and put to sleep, they harbor the sense of immortality, of being exempt from death in the way that death is present only because of the image making faculty and the attribution of meaning. Physical death is a symbol, not a fact in the life of these people. It’s more than a concept, because it is not separated from life, it’s an expression of life. Every component of life has a purpose, because the fact that anything shows up in consciousness must mean that it belongs to spirit. The spirit is pure light, pure being. The optimism that is usually associated with Aries, Leo and Sagittarius stems from this notion. The negative attributes of arrogance, superiority and intolerance that are sometimes shown in individuals with these signs are due to compensation for disconnection with the intangible. They don’t feel immortal and need to compensate for it by elevating themselves above others. It’s a childish attempt to regain potency, but it’s not genuine, it’s artificial.

Speaking of artificial, since fire is associated with the archetypal realm, individuals with strong fire placements tend to be able to step into the energy signature of a certain archetype and live it out. This is a great source of strength, but it is never the less a substitute for cultivating real confidence and power. Through the use of a certain jargon or mannerism that is essentially “taken on”, the person is able to navigate the environment and get certain needs met without having to put in the effort of actually meeting them on one’s own. For example, a person could want to live out the father archetype in order to gain strength and a sense of purpose. By stepping into the energy signature the person can live a life that is worthy of this specific archetype and feel safe as part of a set narrative. Fire is intimately connected to tales and story lines – and fire dominant individuals generally feel safe in the world of legend and myth. This might lead them to cope through bringing this world into real life, to compensate for feelings of inferiority and incompetence. They might be able to embody archetypes to the extent that they elude people – the façade seems so seamless and organic, almost too consistent.

The real strength of fiery individuals is found in the capacity to be, not in turning to archetypes to cover for a weak ego. Fire is not about what there is – it’s about the “is-ness”, the essence, and the spirit of life. It can’t be substituted with or derived from anything other than itself.

To flip the tables, I’d like to discuss the Air element. Air is somewhat of an agent of spirit, a mediator of life. Extending and reaching into the unknown, seeing the potential in the expression of thought and form. It’s the connective function within the psyche; in symbolic terms it’s the bridge that is made between point A and point B. Air is the function of relatedness which is distinctively different from merging, which is more characteristic of water and the emotions. While being the bridge, air is also the points on each side of the bridge. To make it even more complex, it’s also the absence of the bridge and the points. Air has no substance but can imitate substance accurately enough to be squarely in the perspective of a particular substance. It has the function of detachment, which allows for observation and objectivity. It also has the function of disidentification, which makes it possible to step back from or get closer to something that exist in consciousness. Perhaps equally important to mention is that air not only allows for disindentification but identification as well. In order to be able to relate from something and to something there has to be the introduction of duality. Subject interacts with object, which can be illustrated by a simple sentence. The air element is what allows for a conceptual “I” to exist and it’s defined by a simultaneous conceptualization of a “you”, “I am talking to you”. Language and communication is inevitably dualistic in this way. The intellect has a separating function – it depends on refining and dividing experiences into manageable parts.

Air dominant individuals operate primarily on the level of the intellect, which gives them the reputation for being conventionally smart, interactive, curious, inquisitive and reasonable. On the more negative end, they’re known for being prone to over-analyze, rationalize and not experience reality through anything other than the interpretative functions. As many have discovered, words are only pointers and don’t offer anything else than conceptual understanding. The experiential and functional components of reality are sublimated for abstractions. It makes air people very good at selling and promoting because they can interpret reality to their liking. The thought scape has limitless potential – which also contributes to making air people great liars, or more positively, great persuaders. As already stated, air is the subject and object but also neither of the two. Getting out of tight spots and trappings is one of their greatest advantages for this reason, but it could also lead to confusion. Is the subject the object or the object the subject? You see what I’m getting at.

Life of air dominant people primarily consists of relationships – not only with others but with themselves as well. There’s usually uncertainty around what one thinks or what one is without the contrast that other people provide. This is especially the case for Libra, the air sign of partnership. A conceptual self is derived from observing another and assuming a role that works to create equilibrium and balance. It’s not “ultimate” balance, but the relative balance that can be achieved between two shifting components. For Gemini, it’s more about general interaction and play then perfecting communion and for Aquarius there’s an emphasis on ethicality and mental ideals than balancing out polarity. Overall, air is necessary to provide context. Without the ability for comparison and evaluation, events are void of implication. There’s no clear direction or perception of direction. It’s easy for air dominants to confuse the mind with a concept and locking themselves into a mental prison. It’s also easy for them to not identify with anything in particular and be a constant inconstant, which paradoxically serves as fixed identity anyway.

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manjuhitorie · 4 years ago

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Hitorie Interview - Skream! Magazine - Feb. 2021 Issue

First and foremost, I'd like to address REAMP as a whole. I couldn't help but pick up on signs inner turmoil and sorrow over wowaka's unfortunate passing, among a brand new resolve. What's your opinion on this such take?

Shinoda: We voluntarily chose to vent those feelings without any beating around the bush. This band has taken a huge twist in terms of the one who sings, writes, and produces the music, after all. There’s no point in hiding that, we felt. To be completely honest, even after all this time we still haven’t exactly regained our balance at all. Sad is sad. In order to express our choice to push onwards, the cards we had in our hands are.... -Actually the word “cards” was a poor choice. We merely had no other option but to express our feelings outright. ygarshy: We weren’t in the place to put together a theme or concept for the album or anything like that either. We felt baffled and confused by the very fact that we were making songs at all, but nevertheless I felt we had to do it, we just have to. We were wishy-washy so, we decided to hold the times we 4 made songs together close to our hearts, and use that as our foothold: to just try and write as we always do. Shinoda: Squeezing a song out was our one and only objective. Yumao: Yeah. The universe wowaka alone had created and his structures and all that.. To be honest, this new album is cut off from it... We chose to not agonize over trying to recreate it, and to rather let whatever we could just flow out of us.

I have a question about the timeline. After wowaka’s passing, when did you make the concrete decision to keep Hitorie alive?

Shinoda: To be real, we still haven’t even made that decision. Yumao: We haven’t concretely said “Let’s keep this up.” or anything. Our mixed emotions are still churning, or how to say it... When we wrote the music we become immersed and even excited about it but, once our songs were laid out on the table we came back to our senses, like “Uhm? Is this okay?” ygarshy: Even now I’ll have sudden thoughts like “Hm? What am I doing here?”, even when we toured as a trio for the Hitori-Escape Tour 2019, I never thought ‘Let’s keep going on like this’ as well, owing to the circumstances. Just, if we didn’t do it we would’ve lost out minds is all. Shinoda: He speaks the truth alright. ygarshy: If we had to make a thoughtful commitment, I think it would’ve taken us hundreds upon hundreds of years until we finally made a move.

Was there not any type of critical moment during the tour wherein you realized “We can do this?”

Shinoda: Truthfully, during the tour I was so deep into it that I barely even the foggiest memory as to what was going through my brain back then. What I can say for sure is that 2 years ago on June 1st at the Memorial Concert (At Shinkiba Studio Coast), before that day I hadn’t stood on the stage in months. For the past 10 years of my life I haven’t gone that long without the stage. So when I got up for the Memorial Concert, despite it being a tragic event, I felt that when I’m up on stage with this band my mental state is the most stable it ever is. We even all went out for Chinese food after that.

The three of you did?

Shinoda: Yep. We drank our heads off and talked about how “We could totally manage a tour too, eh?” Yumao: Since our HOWLS tour (Hitorie Tour 2019 “Coyote Howling”) was cancelled, we felt we owed something, that we had to do something. We may be sad but, even more important than that was the urgency of the situation.

So there was no resolve or concrete decision to tour and make an album then.

Shinoda: Yep, looking back, I think that’s right.

Were you writing songs while touring?

Shinoda: We started writing around March of 2020? Yumao: Due to COVID-19 we had a lot of free time on our hands, so we took the oppurtunity. Though it wasn’t as if we said “Alright, let’s get going!”, we just all knew it was imminent, and that we had to do it at some point. That point was then.

Which was the first song you wrote?

Among the ones which made the cut, “Marshall A” was the first one consummated at the studio. Though “Utsutsu” was the first one made in my head. Around the end of the tour in 2019 the idea for the phrases took form. I felt that if I was to ever write for Hitorie again, this would be it.

”Utsutsu” stresses sorrow way thicker and heavier than any of the other songs in the album, so it makes sense that it came first.

Shinoda: It gets my feelings across, doesn’t it... The lyric and sung melody of “Utsutsu da ne” were around since the beginning.

Did you each make a song voluntarily?

Yumao: Yessiree. It was like “I’m’ere writing, so you'd better pick it up too." Shinoda: We had the slogan "Let's make 10 songs in one month". Yumao: Even if it was one chorus of a song, that would be okay. Shinoda: In the end, the ratio of songs I, ygarshy and Yumao completed was 8:1:1 (Though in the album itself it became 6:2:2). It might seem unbalanced, but this is perfectly balanced for us. ygarshy: Shinoda just makes a heap ton of songs. Shinoda: From there we picked and chose.

Did you have any standards for which would make the cut? Such as befitting of the current Hitorie or not?

Shinoda: That too was all over the place. Personally when I write, I place importance in how it will pan out with Hitorie as a whole but, I also contemplated what would fit our band's current climate. "Should the guitar not be too distorted?" "Should it not sound too 'rock band-ish'?", my mind was going crazy, I thought it would be best if it was entirely chilled out and mellow. There was a moment when a switch flipped.

It is true that songs such as 'tat' do take that direction, but after listening to the complete album I have to say, the rock band-ish style is in full bloom. There's a lot of distortion too.

Shinoda: Yep, it's distorted. Yumao: And it's rock (giggling). ygarshy: Listening to Shinoda say that just now made me upset.

Why is that?

ygarshy: Because I had purposefully intended for it to be distorted. Everyone: Ahahaha!

So you like distortion (laughing). To push this point further, would it be true to say that those are core aspects of Hitorie's style? Shinoda: Ahh, there’s definitely truth in that.

Yumao: The one most mindful of that had to have been ygarshy. Whatever we release next can’t be too distant from classic Hitorie, he was the one who secured how best to keep the string in tact.

Where was the poster song ’curved edge’ made in the creative process timeline? Shinoda: We upheld the slogan of 10 songs a month for about 2 months, and ‘curved edge’ was the final one. I wanted to make a classic Hitorie style riff-based song, but I didn’t want high-tempos. ‘curved edge’ was where I finally found the perfect balance between my wishes and Hitorie’s standards.

Hitorie never made songs with unwavering low tempos that take off into an uplifting dance breakdown at the chorus up until now after all.

Shinoda: Yeah. We all made the silent agreement to absolutely not try and make songs like wowaka’s.

I can definitely detect wowaka’s influence on your music, which is natural after being in a band together for so long. So, you kept it at.

ygarshy: We’ve each grown a keen sense for this. Suppose we were to show wowaka a song we wrote that mimics his style... He would make a really disgusted face. We just know, we just have a sense for it.

Shinoda: That’s the thing he despises the most after all.

ygarshy: That’s right. It would be but as a parody. And we wouldn’t want to do that.

ygarshy, you wrote the songs ‘Image’ and ‘dirty, correct. The melody of them feel nostalgic and longing, yet simultaneously evoke a rush and shivers.

ygarshy: In my current state letting the music flow out of me is all I’m capable of. Last spring, or summer was it, where we were showing each other our songs I.... Felt sad. So sad. Like “Why am I writing songs for Hitorie? Why is this what it’s come to?”

Yumao: Yep yep.

ygarshy: That’s why “dirty” and “Image” both are not very elaborate pieces. There’s much room to mix up chords or arrange it to be complex but, I just really had no heart to do that. Whatever popped out of my head wasn’t tinkered in the slightest, my wish was to keep in its organic simple form.

So when you handled the arrangement of music as a band, did you change as little as possible?

ygarshy: For the two songs I brought in, they were nice and stayed as close to demo version as they possibly could. “dirty” especially has a garage-style melody and tone which clicks immediately, so the lyrics and singing were molded to follow suit. Shinoda: Him (ygarshy) and I are the same age and all, so I pretty much can grasp whatever he goes for. Like he was probably going for those late 1990’s declining vibes. ygarshy: Exactly. I had thought to myself that I wanted dirty lyrics, and he actually delivered just that. I’d like to hear the story behind the two songs Yumao wrote as well, “YUBIKIRI” and “faceless enemy”. Both melodies are pop.

Yumao: That just kind of happens with me. Shinoda: He makes my contemplating and agonizing look stupid, because those songs are just as clear as fresh water. Yumao: All I did was squeeze out whatever I could (laughing). To be honest, I think my songs will be the most unacceptable to Hitorie’s listeners. I may be a member of Hitorie, and understand Hitorie like the back of my hand but, from the start I knew I’m incapable of writing songs to Hitorie’s standards. I took a realistic approach. ygarshy: Though I really enjoy the music Yumao wrote before Hitorie. So when he brought it those genuine honest pieces, I was so happy. I think I like the songs more than he himself does.

The fact that you chose to keep Yumao’s songs in the album despite them not being perfectly Hitorie fashioned, sounds like proof that you’ve found your answer for this album.

Yumao: Pedaling to the mettle is what I have to do, it’s all I can do. No matter if it’s acceptable or not, I’m doing what I can. That’s one message behind my songs.

Your song “YUBIKIRI” as the final track of the album has a lot of impact as well. It’s a bright and cheery song yet somehow it brings a tear to the eye.

Shinoda: Doesn’t it?

Yumao: It’s very cheery and it’s the brightest of the mix, isn’t it. When I wrote I was riding the groove in over my head, so I asked Shinoda to make the lyrics sound immature, like something a teenager would click with. I felt knotted up inside, and I needed something to break the chains for me. Completely divert from what Hitorie should or shouldn’t do, I alone needed to express and vent myself. And that’s how this song happened.

Shinoda: Yumao made that direct request of me, so I steered my word choices far away from any purple-prose. The keyboard was played by NariHane of Passpied, and when those 3 were off recording the music without me, I finished the lyrics. That’s how quickly they were zipped out.

After completing a whole album, how do you feel, do you think you will be able to continue on like this?

Shinoda: I don’t know yet. We’ll have to hear the people’s opinions. ygarshy: And what are we going to do after hearing them? After performing all these concerts? is one apprehension I have but,.. everything feels so up in the air.

Yumao: I know we haven’t said anything conclusive but! I want people to know we have a mountain of hypotheses on how we could move forward, on how we could keep Hitorie going, on how we could keep wowaka alive but, for now this album was just a do-or-die for us!

Shinoda: We made it, that’s all we needed.

Yumao: Yep. It was an absolute for us. I want to get that point across. This album is our declaration: that “We’ve taken one step forward”!

#Hitorie #interview #ヒトリエ #REAMP

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bopinion · 3 years ago

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2021 / 38

Aperçu of the Week:

"If we can find the will to send people to the moon and solve male baldness... we can solve simple problems like letting our people eat at affordable prices".

Mia Amor Mottley (Prime Minister of Barbados / At the UN general assembly last week)

Bad News of the Week:

China is currently making little effort to conceal its democratic deficits. First, the successful domestic tech industry was reminded in no uncertain terms who the elephant in the room is. And then the world public was reminded that there is still no independent judiciary in "The Middle Kingdom".

Only hours after a Canadian judge (due to an extradition agreement in coordonation with the United States) had released Huawei's chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou, it occurred to the Chinese judiciary, by chance and on the spur of the moment, that the two Canadian citizens, who had been in prison for three years on the flimsy grounds of espionage, could be released and allowed to leave the country.

A state can hardly communicate more bluntly that it sees its organs only as tools of its (economic) political objectives. Optimists call this behavior a "controlled democracy," pessimists simply a dictatorship. Every citizen of a country that is currently thinking aloud about excluding Chinese equipment suppliers from the expansion of fiber optic and 5G networks due to security concerns should think very carefully about traveling to China. The return ticket could expire faster than you can say "I insist on contacting my embassy."

Good News of the Week:

Movements come and go. Even if the reasons of their motives haven't factually changed, they do fall out of fashion in our fast-paced times. "Fridays for future" seems to remain. In fact, nothing has changed in their raison d'être either - except the narrative. If before Corona's big pause button it was about the recognition of "climate change", now it is about concrete action against the "climate crisis". That the movement is still very much alive became evident last friday, when millions took to the streets in more than 80 countries to make their voices heard.

I am also pleased to see how the FFF demonstrations contrast with the other dominant "we are the people" theme lately, namely the contrarians or anti-vaccinationists. While the latter ignore scientific findings just as much as hygiene concepts, Fridays for future relies precisely on scientific findings and therefore consequently also adheres to the rules of the game. In this respect, they also show that the basic rights of, in this case, freedom of assembly, the right to demonstrate and freedom of speech are not undermined by "those up there".

It remains to be hoped that the pressure to act that has been built up in this way is or will be great enough for those up there. The signs are not bad: for the first time, climate change/sustainability/environmental protection is the most dominant issue according to various polls, evergreens such as internal security or economic growth are just as far behind as populist bullshit such as migration restrictions and national isolation. Accordingly, most parties have readjusted their positioning - some more credibly than others. Therefore, there is a real chance of policy change in this regard, as the set of issues is likely to survive the carnage of exploratory talks and coalition negotiations. Fingers crossed.

Personal happy Moment of the Week:

Just got back from voting (parliament and government at the federal level). Which I traditionally do on site at the polling station, as it gives me a sense of "Democracy at work". This time I was there together with my daughter, who at now 18 years old is allowed to vote for the first time. And did so out of genuine civic interest. Rarely have I seen someone put so much effort into her decision - she has been researching and deliberating for weeks. The commitment of her and her generation fills me with a certain hope for the years and decades ahead, which will be anything but easy.

I couldn't care less...

...that the recount of the U.S. presidential election in Arizona did not result in success for the Republicans. The commissioned "cyber ninjas" could not find any significant deviations from the recorded result - on the contrary: Biden even received 360 votes more than officially reported. The ridiculous election fraud allegations by Trump and his gang of Democrat enemies were a house of cards from the start, serving only to fuel public doubts about the legitimacy of elections themselves. Hopefully, this nightmare is finally over.

As I write this...

...16 years of Angela Merkel are coming to an end - officially, because she will remain in office as acting chancellor until a new government is in place, and that will take time. Currently, one reads a lot about her political record. And, of course, there is a lot of light and a lot of shade in it. Nevertheless, it was and still is remarkable that the Germans have actually always been able to sleep quite well on her watch. This has not really been the case in the U.S., Hungary or Turkey in recent years. In this respect, "Mutti" deserves a solid thank you.

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coldalbion · 4 years ago

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Thoughts on mythic morality

(Disclaimer/CN: This post discusses such things as depictions of rape, theft, murder, kinslaying and incest. None of what of what I write here should be taken as approval of, or apologia in relation to these acts.) “You look at trees and called them ‘trees,’ and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star,’ and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree,’ 'star,’ were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of 'trees’ and 'stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was 'myth-woven and elf patterned’.” — J.R.R. Tolkien

The above quote is a charming one, isn’t it? Tolkien’s invocation of another way of seeing, of existing, beguiles us with its sense of possibility. It is, like much of myth and story, fundamentally conservative - not in the political sense, but in the conservational sense. As an attempt to preserve, or at least, keep possibilities open in the mind of the reader, it’s pretty good. Of course, the wrinkle is - or some may say - that this took place in the distant past. Nobody, they might say, sees the world like this - or if they do, then their perception is deluded - because we are past that. We see the world representationally now, striving towards accuracy. Anything else is just superstition, is it not?

The mistake these stereotypical straw men make - within the context that I have breathed life into them for - is to suggest that a linear path between “then-now”, and “past-future”. Actually, they make several mistakes, not least because of their unexamined bias. I’ll not elucidate them all here, but suffice to say that our vegetative friends have not considered, amongst other things, the role of the cultural, historical, and philosophical structures which influence how we perceive and know things. In philosophy, such consideration of knowledge and how, why, what, and where we know things is called epistemology. The thing with philosophy is that it covers many things: morality, ethics, metaphysics, linguistics, epistemology, sociology etc. We have words for all these things, and they are often their own disciplines. Philosophy - literally descending from “philia” + “sophia”, meaning affection or love for wisdom - can cover a kind of work in them all them all, precisely because understanding and using what is learnt in these many and varied arenas, and dong so well? Understanding the implications? Knowing that we know nothing for certain and that things are seldom as they first? This is wise, these things are wise, and so: wisdom is the useful, sound, and valuable deployment of knowledge and living life itself well.

Our straw men, conjured into existence by the magic of speech and words - shapings of breath digitized and transmitted across the planet to you, dear reader? They are brought forth into a world where the majority of its unexamined structures descend from the cultural shapings of men with pale skins. Dig further back, and deeper, and you will find that those men re-ordered, restructured and built upon the knowings and experiences of people who were not white or male. The structures of how we perceive, how we know what we know - even how we are taught to think, and express and feel? These did not come from nowhere - unfiltered and whole from the mind of one omnipotent, omniscient, Creator. Rather, many powers and potencies, principalities and agencies act all together. The flows of power, influence, propaganda, social and economic capital; the emotional and cultural response to events and experiences. All of these are contoured and shaped by the many. That many of the pale-skinned men shaped much of our world today is an accident of birth which is then compounded by economic and social factors based on climate, trade routes, geography, resources etc. This acquisition is then compounded and backward rationalized - the accidental conflux of factors becomes a self-justification for ideas of false superiority, which drives behaviours which weight things in the favour of that group. Make no mistake reader - there are still many worlds, even today. Bounded spaces, their boundaries staked out by those with the influence and ability to enforce them. That this is being written by a pale skinned man from North Western Europe is no coincidence. Nor is the fact that many will be able to read this, though my tongue is not what they speak natively - their first words carried a history different to mine. For various reason those people learnt my language which sneaks up behind others and mugs them in dark alleys, or engages in savagely lucrative trade deals. History literally is an accounting what has gone before, thus recounted by those later to be reckoned as accurate sources and authority. It is not all violence, theft and brutality. It is cultural exchange, trade, sharing, incorporation and diffusion also. All these things flow between in flux - this is influence. Influence is often codified and commodified under the rubric of power in an attempt to wield it more universally - which inevitably divorces it from its original context and forces a more acquisitive mindset amongst those who seek it, rather than seeking out points of influential confluence and integrating oneself within that. The orality of history, and cultural transmission, is not something often thought of today. With the advent of writing, information and knowledge conservation shifts to the texts themselves as authority - the metaphor of something being “there in black and white” refers to newspapers, but the sense of it descends from textual authority. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the historic belief structure of those pale people is rooted in a distortion of a heresy of a Middle-Eastern monotheism, which in itself seems been an offshoot of various Middle-Eastern polytheisms. That Judaism has a central authoritative text, leavened with thousands of years of oral and written commentaries and arguments should be noted. That this text was itself an edited version which scholars believe contains multiple texts, and was added to and redacted from, in response to socio-political and religious reasons over time, is also of note. That that text was selectively edited and canonized, before being translated in various languages in response to socio-political and religious reasons over time, is worth further note. That this collage of ancient material is elevated to holy scripture and used as basis for moral authority for the majority of the pale people for over a thousand years, and used as justification for imperalism, rape, murder, theft, oppression, oppression on grounds of sexuality, gender - and was a fundamental source of, and during, the social construction of the concept of race - would be shocking, were it not for the desire for that which is referred to as ‘power’ and ‘authority’. The singularity of authority and power presupposes scarcity. This is to say that fixed, codified protocols of behaviour, perception, and emotional affect allow definition and navigation in an unpredictable kosmos. By structuring experience, we make sense and it is by sense that we structure the world in a feedback loop. In a society based on orality, it is the stories that are told which preserve, iterate upon, and transmit knowledge and culture. In this, it’s worth quoting Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.” What this means is that how a message is transmitted influences the message content and context. Similarly, it is how and by whom-as-medium it is transmitted which influences the message. Oral societies are often conservative in nature - there are ways things are done, and for reasons. Thus, to deviate from that is dangerous, precisely because things are done that way for a reason which benefits certain people. Whether those certain people are an elite or a society as whole varies according to societal structures. Those who deviate are dangerous for several reasons - they are unpredictable, which in many societies at one time meant that they are or were a potential threat. They are non-conformist, which implies they may not honour the social contract which is supposed important in keeping everyone safe and keeping the world-order-as-society knows it running.

Recall Tolkien’s charm? His elder possibility is a world-order or worldview (weltanschauung) which sees the numinosity in all things. It thus sees flux and agency and multiplicity. In the case of polytheism and animism, the multiplicity of agents and powers suggests a multitude of agents all acting on one another and interpenetrating - rather like ripples or interference patterns. Gods and “Big spirits” ( terminology that is pretty much synonymous in the mind of this author for the purposes of discussion) can be said to have mythic “mass”. A large stone dropped into a pond will make bigger ripples and cancel or interfere with smaller ripples generated by smaller pebbles. When considering gods as establishers of world-order - or even creating worlds, it’s instructive to consider that in many mythologies, this is accomplished by the overthrow of a previous order or set of structures, and their reconfiguration. Which is usually, to judge my many world mythologies, a polite way to suggest murder and butchery; fundamentally catastrophic in all the linguistic and etymological senses of the word.. Once bloodily established, it is usually the actions and processes of the gods which keep the kosmos running. This accreted behaviour forms mores. Myth is thus a recounting of these behaviours and deviations therefrom, not simply as dry recounting but as felt experience which stimulates emotional and psychological affect which joins all participants (human and otherwise) into a shared epistemological framework. In any society, the element of performance is key in any media - not just what the media ism but how it does it, as mentioned above. In an oral society where knowledge is shared through speech, whether by poetry or storytelling, the performance of the teller is key, as is the setting and context of the delivery. Many myths depict rape, murder, theft, trade, sharing, incorporation and diffusion. In this, they are as much like other forms of media as anything else. Likewise, it of course is the choice of those personally affected by such things not to engage with such things if they feel it would be detrimental to them. Yet, in dealing with myth, particularly if one views it not as synonymous with falsehood, but in fact expressive of some world-reality which forms the root of of our perceptions and experience, we often have questions of morality. To say that myths containing rape, incest, murder, theft etc “offer a window onto a different time” or to suggest that the actions of a mythological figure are literally representationally true and thus that figure should be hated and despised is to present only a fairly shallow reading in the view of the author. Let us take the Norse god Odin - he who, according the texts we have, committed near- genocide against giant-kind; slaughtering his own kindred the god (along with his brothers) butcher the primeval giant Ymir and use his body to make the worlds. The brothers then create humans by breathing life into two logs/trees found by the sea shore - far better then men of straw, no? He steals the Mead of Inspiration (itself brewed from the blood of a murdered god) after seducing and tricking its giant-maiden guardian, but not before killing nine thralls in order to get close to her father - bearing the name Bolverk (evil-doer). He uses magic to impregnate Rindr after she turns him down repeatedly, making it so that Valli, the agent of vengeance for the death of Balfr, is a product of rape - regardless that he is in the shape of/dressed of a woman at the time. He attempts to have his way with Billing’s daughter, but is discovered and chased away by a pack of angry men. He sets up heroes to die in the midst of battle, abandoning them at the precise moment they need his aid. He is, in short, a major bastard. Did the Norse enjoy stories of rape? Was it a particular genre that pleased them? We have the images of Vikings as raping and pillaging, after all? Certainly, there are texts that suggest they had a different view of sexuality and violence than we do today. But is perhaps our take on Odin in the myths we have had passed down to us heavily biased? Of course. For one, it appears the idea of Odin as chief god in Iceland was due to the preponderance of preserved texts. Archaeology suggests Thor was more popular with the population-at-large than the weird and terrible bastard wizard Stabby McOne-Eye the murder hobo. But Odin is the Master of Inspiration - and both kings and poets were buoyed by his patronage. That this is passed down, collected and written down by a Christian after Christianization of Iceland, and then translated to English, some eight or nine centuries later?

This influences the medium and message. Further, amongst certain neopagans and heathen polytheists, there is a tendency to look at the preserved texts in a similar way to the Bible. This is a product of the mutations of that North West European brand of heresy we mentioned, contextualized in sectarian manner (Protestantism has a lot to answer for). Even if the myths are treated not as literal, we have been culturally contoured to look at myths which describe religious and numinous experience as exemplary. That’s to say, things that serve as examples or moral models, illustrations of general rules. In a sense, that’s akin to looking to police procedurals or popular movies, or 24hr news channels for a sense of morality today. Such things do contain troubling assumptions today - valourisation of violence if it “gets the job done” in movies, or news stories inciting rage for political or social gain as example. Yet their key raison d’etre is experiential affect. Information and mores may be passed on and inculcated unconsciously, yes. But to view their content as explicitly and directly representational without bias? This is surely dangerous. Furthermore, our attitudes to sexuality and violence, both as distinct groupings and how they interplay in all forms of media are worthy of critique - exactly what is acceptable and why? What is the historical and social context for this? So if myth is not to be read as moral exemplar, what then? In this we must engage beyond a surface reading, if we so choose. As method of epistemic transmission and framing, myth is is not exemplary, but does aid in modelling. It is the response to myth that aids modelling not the myth itself. To say Odin is a rapist, a murderer, and thief is important - not because he is, or is not these things, but what that means to the audience participating in the myth, both historically and currently in context. This is why his self-naming as Bolverk is so important, within the context of the myths. Performer and audience and mythic figure all acknowledge this behaviour as unacceptable to humans. Throughout the myth cycle, the “morally dubious” stories illustrate deviance from acceptability is only viable longterm if one is influential, and this motif exists across cultures. There are always consequences for such behaviour, whether it be the dooming of the world, or more subtle responses. Yet they serve a doubly illustrative function in the case of Odin, and other such figures (often Trickster or magical figures) wherein their behaviour and character is ambiguous precisely because of that nature - existing asocially, breaking rules and remaking them, surviving and prospering in impossible ways, in often hostile environments. This renders such figures “unsafe” “criminal” or “unnatural”, perhaps even queer in relation to wider society. For such figures, it is the transmission of this quality via the myth which the narrative preserves, even when preserved and iterated upon by time. In this context, to state again, solely literal representational readings of myth are mistaken. This is not to say it is all symbolic, but rather that metaphor transmits information - an Iroquois story says their people learnt to tap maple syrup from squirrels. An Iroquois boy saw a red squirrel cutting into tree bark with its teeth and later returning to lick the sap; the young Iroquois followed the squirrel’s lead and tried the same technique by cutting into the tree bark with a knife, thus discovering the sweet sap. Long derided as mere “myth” or “folklore” it took until the 1990s for a scientist named Bernd Heinrich to observe and record it, publishing in a scientific journal - thus ‘legitimizing’ pre-existing indigenous knowledge.

That such knowledge only became ‘acceptable’ or ‘real’ when performed outside of its original form tells us much about the biases of so-called ‘Western Culture’ as regards myth and folklore. Yet, this example proves the utility of such transmissions, existing over the centuries. That Iceland’s corpus of myth (even in those tales that remained to be written down) may contain metaphorically encode experience which can be re-experienced through felt-sense is made all the more likely, given the preservation of highly localized folklore and histories. Questions of legitimacy or lack are defined by flows of influence and power - inextricably linked to agency and consequence. Myth is therefore conceivable as a manifestation of currents of social influence and should never be held as a fixed thing, whether or not one has positive or negative emotional response to its figures

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bitsinakaleidoscope · 4 years ago

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So I’ve been playing around with this idea for around half a day by now [because it literally came to me right as I was trying to fucking go to sleep]. Basically it’s me shifting the CotBG sects further towards Transhumanist Machine Cult than Doomsday Machine Cult. There’s also gonna be some stuff about the Foundation at the end, and I SWEAR it’s not because I’m completely used to O5verthinking’s O5-1 “Founder” [/lh you’re great, Rosencrantz].

Putting this under a read more because I have chronic Write An Entire Academic Paper syndrome.

To kick this off, I need to explain what’s going to change with the Mekhanites before I say why. Each sect basically gets their own brand of transhumanism from each other. The Broken Church is metaphorical and boring, at least in the sense of what they do with their bodies. I can imagine that exploring the thoughts of a follower of the Broken Church would be really interesting. The Cogwork Orthodoxy, of course, is going full on transhumanism. They’re trying to build themselves in the likeness of MEKHANE, to an incredibly literal extent. The Maxwellists overall seem to be a more “mind over matter” sect. I don’t think they’re trying to revoke every single organic material there is on themselves. They’re more focused on augmentations, improvements, making it easier for their minds to make a machine out of their bodies, without actually making it all metal. If Orthodoxy people would replace their entire limbs with new metal ones, Maxwellists would be more likely to wear an exoskeleton. Of course, this is ignoring prosthesis, in which case I’d assume every sect has something for that. Overall, instead of going we have to reassemble MEKHANE Themself, they’re more like we need to build our likenesses to resemble MEKHANE Themself.

Now, the reason why I made this change is the potential conflict there could be with the concept of substitutionary atonement. A quick explanation of what substitutionary atonement is, for those who might not know, is basically the whole “Jesus died for your sins” thing. MEKHANE broke Herself in order to cage Yaldabaoth, and now everyone needs to work to evoke Her image the best they can themself. Of course, there are going to be people who object to this ideology, but still believe/follow MEKHANE. These people are the classic “Let’s find all the parts of the Broken God and put Him back together!” followers that I’m assuming the CotBG was created for in the first place. Their work towards transhumanism is meant so that they can aid in combating and defeating Yaldabaoth once and for all, after reassembling MEKHANE. If MEKHANE wants us to be whole, then MEKHANE should be whole as well.

Adjacent to them, there are the Nalkans who are basically just like “Imagine following a god who hands you your transhumanism on a silver platter” [then again, I could easily shorten that to “Imagine following a god”]. This also falls in line with Nalkan beliefs [at least the newer interpretations of them], where they work to elevate themselves. Or only themself, if they’re one of the goddamn filthy capitalists [/lh]. They don’t believe in the sacrifice of one to benefit all. They either believe in the cooperation of all to benefit all, or capitalism [goddamn it, Neo Nalkans]. They would scoff at the idea of following any entity and making themselves in that entity’s likeness. They’re gonna take their flesh and make it however they want it to be like, fuck any entity who tries to tell them otherwise.

And now, for the part you’ve all been waiting for, how does the Foundation fit in here. Well, I’d say they’re practically high on substitutionary atonement. Look no further than the phrase “We die in the dark, so you can live in the light.” Though this is on the level of an entire group, they’re willing to put themselves through constant suffering in order to keep the world from ending. They stretch themselves thin in order to keep the Construct afloat. Hell, D-Class are promised atonement if they aid in the containment of different SCPs, and survive. But this will never come, as they aren’t the ones who will be atoned. The Foundation is trying their hardest to keep humanity from being damned. And, surprisingly enough, so is the GOC.

In the Operative’s Handbook, there are two main headers: “You are expendable” and “You are not disposable.” The section labeled “You are expendable” explains how, out of the billions of people alive, you must be willing to sacrifice yourself in order to protect them. For “You are not disposable,” they clarify that the person can’t just throw themself around, because they have limited resources. Overall, this is a similar attitude to what the Foundation feels, though for the Foundation, it’s less given through order in a handbook and more inherited from the culture surrounding the group. Both the Foundation and the GOC, though in opposition over what to do with dangerous anomalies, still follow the idea of substitutionary atonement. They’re both standing on the front lines of a threat that could destroy humanity, and they’re allowing themselves to bear that brunt.

And there really isn’t much opposition to those two doing that shit on site. Like, yeah, you’ll have the Foundation undermine the GOC, GOC undermine the Foundation, UIU might get something in against either one of them, but overall, nobody’s really complaining about the whole substitutionary atonement thing. I’m not counting the Serpent’s Hand or Chaos Insurgency in this, they’re both too disorganized to count. Though, having a cell of either one of those groups being opposed to the Foundation and/or GOC because of the reason that no group should have to condemn themselves to suffering would be an interesting thing to see.

Treading into the land of Personal Canon, the conflict within the Normalcy Org. gang arises when the Foundation expects other groups/people to throw themselves to the front lines “for the sake of the Veil/Construct.” The choice is simple to them, one or a few people’s lives or the Veil/Construct. And the answer is simple as well, a handful of people is nothing compared to reality as a whole, therefore they should be down to sacrifice themselves. The UNGOC, being the distant oversight group that they are, are totally down with this. Groups nearer to Normalcy, however, don’t agree with this. For them, a life, human or otherwise, is still just as precious as anything else. For them, even if it might risk the collapse of the Veil or destruction of the Construct, they want to find a way for everyone to get out alive.

Drawing from An Unconventional Tail, the UIU- and, in extent, JOVE- is better at minimizing injuries and casualties than the Foundation is, most likely because their first thought is “How can I solve this without harming anyone” instead of “How can I solve this with the least casualties.” They go in with the idea of no man left behind, the Foundation wouldn’t feel as bad if a handful died. In theory, the UNGOC would be closer towards the UIU but even site canon says they’re willing to discard “Protection” for the sake of “Survival.”

Now, I’m not saying any group is in the wrong here. Each group’s goals call for different mentalities and beliefs. However, that must be kept in mind when each of them are interacting with each other, and that’s when the problems arise. When there’s a failure to understand the, well, culture surrounding the other group, you’ll get conflict.

Moral of the story aside, that’s all I have for this so far. Expect to see this pop up in whatever stuff I write, if I ever end up posting that shit on here.

#scp #scp foundation #scp wiki #scp headcanons #scp fandom #scp cotbg #this is WAY longer than i expected it to be holy shit #anyways if you couldnt tell i read that one post about pmmm and couldnt fucking stop thinking about substitutionary atonement #though the good part is that it might solve my problem with What The Fuck Is The Plot For Mel And Sofis Arc #i find it funny how the part about the foundation + normalcy orgs. is longer than the part about the fun fantasy gnostic cults #you know #the original focus of this fucking post

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musical-chick-13 · 4 years ago

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Melisandre too please

OKAY STRAP IN MY FRIEND BECAUSE I WANT TO SCREAM ABOUT GOT WOMEN TODAY

• Did they live up to their potential? / In what ways was their potential unachieved?

I’m going to stick to the show because, again finished when the books aren’t. So, I really love Melisandre with my whole heart. You know, you have this mysterious woman who easily manipulates a powerful man, but it’s not just a standard femme-fatale I love power kind of thing. She grew up enslaved (at least in book canon, I can’t remember if this was ever mentioned in the show), and she’s in, essentially, a codependent relationship with her religious faith. It’s not for some sort of fake demureness or quest for purity, it’s because she thinks it’s genuinely the only thing she can do to save the world. She’s not a corrupt pastor, she’s an extremist who truly thinks she’s doing the right thing. But she’s not quite a competely-brainwashed, naive young victim, either. Obviously being sold into slavery and trained in the priesthood since forever ago influences her beliefs. But she reflects deeply on the nature of morality and owns up readily to the fact that sometimes she engages in acts of violence in the name of what she believes. It’s not an accident, people’s lives simply come at the expense of her service to R’hllor and faith in the coming of Azor Azai. She balances a very fine line between two extremes of the religious zealot morality spectrum, and I think she does it very well. The one thing I will say is that the show couldn’t seem to make up its mind on whether or not she was a fraud or whether she actually had Special Magic Powers. And not in kind of a “We won’t show you all the details of what happened, judge for yourself if she’s legit” way. They had her whole conversation with Selyse about using potions for desired fire effects, but she gives birth to shadow assassin babies and then literally brought someone back from the dead. If you’re going to make it ambiguous, keep it ambiguous. If not, make a decision and commit to it. Being completely shrouded in mystery; being a complete, unapologetic fraud; and being a supernatural entity entrusted with magic who sometimes misuses it “For The Greater Good” are all much more interesting than flip-flopping back and forth on characterization because you’re afraid to commit to a concept. Also, for some reason, in season 7 her main objective was to bring Jon and Dany together? Why? They should have explained how she got to that point and why she thought it was necessary. Also her death, but I talk about that in the last point.

• How they negatively and positively affected the story.

Positive: She brought Stannis into the story, leading to a discussion about whether or not the concept of justice is born from conformity to rules or a desire to put more good into the world. We are introduced to another religion in Westeros that helps enrich the worldbuilding and leads to a moral compass that is centered so differently from the other characters that it provides a fresh way of interpreting the story’s events and keeps us engaged. We are introduced to Davos aka Onion Dad through her and I love that guy.

Negative: She brought Stannis and Davos into the story, to the point where show Shireen died FOR NO REASON which COMPLETELY RUINED STANNIS’S CHARACTER IN THE PROCESS. Stannis wasn’t supposed to be The Irredeemable Bad Guy, he was supposed to be another link in the chain that encompassed all of the different ways of looking at morality. Instead, they used his multifaceted, complex relationship with Melisandre to flatten out his characterization, make him the resident Pathetic Game Player We Are Supposed to Laugh At, and ultimately left off all degree of nuance by making him burn a child alive for shock value. I’ll never forgive the show for that. (Also, what with Brienne’s smiting of Stannis, Davos being the All-Around Good Guy and the fact that Mel’s death was so...anticlimactic...we’re also apparently supposed to see Stannis as the one primarily responsible for Renly’s death? Just? Ignoring Mel’s (and Davos’s) part in that? Sounds fake and narratively inconsistent, but okay.)

• What my favorite arc for them is.

-I think, probably after Stannis’s death (how said death came about notwithstanding, see above), when she realizes that she was...wrong? About her faith? She thought she knew how the world was supposed to work, like she had finally figured it out and unlocked some big secret, and then it just wasn’t true at all. And (kind of similar to what I said about Cersei) she has to rebuild herself. She and Davos have reversed their ways of thinking, where Davos believes-maybe not in R’hllor or any god(s), but in the existence of inexplicable and superhuman things-and now he has to convince her. And only then does she (and the audience) learn of her true power. (Which, as I mentioned above, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this. Her being a charlatan strikes me as a character choice I would want more in a story I was writing, but I’m not writing these books/episodes, lmao.) Her priorities become more skewed toward “Fighting the White Walkers and making sure whoever Azor Azai is has a world left to save,” which WE LOVE ORGANIC SHIFTS IN PERSONAL MOTIVATION WE REALLY DO Y’ALL

• What I think of their ending.

-Ugh. I don’t think I’ve ever actually talked about this, but her just going, “Well, my goal is done, bye” and then going out into the snow and just laying down to die is...how do I put it...utter bullshit. There was never any true payoff in her ongoing conflict with Davos, no resolution to her (weird, creepy) relationship with Jon or how he felt about her doing awful things but still being the person who brought him back to life, she didn’t even get a moment of dying in service of a cause she believed in (like, for example, Theon, whose ending I also hated but for much more personal reasons that have less to do with narrative structure and more to do with my feelings). She legit just said, “I’m out” and instantaneously died. Also...she, Davos, and Jon have been through a LOT. The fact that there was barely any mention of her or what her death meant save for that one conversation Davos had with Tyrion??? for some reason???? seems like a waste. If someone has been with you through multiple traumatic experiences, it doesn’t matter if you hate them, you’ll have some sort of feelings after they die. Davos never got retribution for Shireen, doesn’t that bother him?? How does Jon feel knowing he owes his life to the killer of an innocent child? How does Davos feel seeing yet another person die right in front of him, but intentionally this time?? *sigh* Emotional through-lines are a thing, people!

• When I wish they had died. / If I think they should’ve died.

-Ultimately, my biggest beef is that there was...nothing I saw in the show that suggested this was how she wanted her story to end. If you’re going to make a character feel hopeless upon resolving a specific problem or tie their entire reason for existing to one conflict, you have to have them talk about it or personally reflect on it? You can’t just stick that on as an afterthought to justify...whatever it was D&D were trying to justify. Melisandre has always had such a complicated relationship with Westerosi morality, and she NEVER got to see any direct consequence of that (and by consequence I don’t even mean, like...punishment or something, I literally just mean a result that happened because of it). She, again, legit just walked in the snow by herself and insta-died. It 100% felt like they just didn’t know what to do with this character so they just scribbled something in so they wouldn’t have to spend any time on her later because they didn’t care about her. (Which, obviously, they’re wrong. I love her and she’s so interesting this is a fact. Shame on you, D&D.) I do think, for her, it makes sense based on her religious ties to kind of...have a last-minute swerve toward penance. Not guilt or redemption, per se, but a way to honor the world she’s trying to save by way of choosing to die through a selfless act. Whether that be sacrificing herself as a distraction for the White Walkers or putting herself in the line of fire (ice?) for Jon because she thinks he'll help heal the world or (my personal favorite) fighting off a White Walker to protect Davos because she has finally come to sort-of understand his nuanced take on morality and that although he has some bad/dark parts, he is genuinely a good man and deserves to make it out alive. Let him have the life that Shireen didn’t get to have. Davos would be SO CONFLICTED because She Did a Good Selfless Thing For Someone Who Wanted To Kill Her But She’s An Awful Person What Do I Think About Good And Evil Now and the introspection would be delicious.

#melisandre #got #asoiaf #meta #tw: suicide mention #davos seaworth #stannis baratheon

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necrowriter · 5 years ago

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monday thing: may eighteenth (on hidden obstacles)

lately I've been thinking about video games.

I've played quite a bit of Animal Crossing since New Horizons came out. so, as you just might have noticed, have a lot of other people. by pure coincidence it happened to come out at a time when a great many people needed exactly the kind of escapism Animal Crossing offers. it's peaceful and soothing and soft, an imaginary getaway to a distant island where the neighbors are all friendly, the waves lap gently against clean bright sand, and there is never anything much to worry about it.

but New Horizons was eagerly anticipated long before anyone had any inkling what the circumstances around its release were going to be. it's the fifth game in a very successful series. Animal Crossing has had something appealing to offer for a long time. in the wake of the success of New Horizons I've seen a number of people wondering--many jokingly, some not--about why, exactly, the series is so appealing. is it really that much fun to pay off a home loan? to pull weeds and water flowers? are people really so invested in the thought of buying furniture or catching bugs to sell?

the usual sort of answer--again, often a joking one, sometimes not--is that the appeal is that you can pay off your home loan, without stress or fear, without interest accumulating, without any consequences if you don't. you can earn all the money you need by doing simple, easy tasks, and in the meantime your tanuki landlord will happily wait on you for years if he has to. well ain't that an impossible dream, amirite? we might as well enjoy doing it in a video game because we have no hope of doing it in real life.

and that answer is true, I think, but it only scratches the surface of something that extends well beyond Animal Crossing.

Animal Crossing is perhaps the most extreme example, but many--maybe even most--video games offer the chance to pursue relatively normal, everyday sort of tasks even when the main focus of the game is something very grand and exciting. massive, open-world adventures and RPGs with epic, sweeping stories very often also allow you the opportunity to customize the living space or wardrobe of your main character, play minigames to earn money and prizes, or pursue smaller sidequests to build relationships with friends or lovers or just to help someone out. start a business! care for pets! grow flowers! hell, just take a nice walk if you want.

and if you listen to people talk about playing these games, you will often hear that they spent a great deal of time and energy on such tasks, sometimes much more than they ever spent on the main story or the bigger quests. given the choice, it seems, people are just as often drawn to the smaller things, even in games that also offer the sort of thing that seems like much more conventional wish-fulfillment. certainly I can attest to this. in Minecraft, a game where you can build enormous castles or terraform entire continents, I have spent many enjoyable hours instead building a small farm or a lakeside cottage. Breath of the Wild is a game where you play as a legendary hero reawoken to battle an ancient and terrible foe that has devastated your entire kingdom and sure, I took on that quest, but I did it in-between spending a lot more time gathering ingredients for cooking, feeding apples to my beloved horse, or taking pictures of birds. as soon as Pokemon offered the chance to take a break from becoming a master trainer of cool, powerful creatures to give those creatures head scritches and feed them cupcakes, you can bet I grabbed that opportunity with both hands.

why do we so often choose to do smaller, even ordinary, things, in these situations where it is just as easy, if not easier, to do great, big, awe-inspiring, impressive ones? when given the chance to be a hero of great renown wielding a sword of legends to save the entire world, why do I so often put doing that off to instead enjoy riding my horse through a sunny meadow? would you not expect the thing that I could never do in real life to hold more appeal and draw than something entirely possible, even ordinary?

well, that's obviously a hell of a deep psychological rabbit hole to go down, but I think part of it is this: games have a way of removing hidden obstacles. alright, and not-so-hidden obstacles, sure. if we look back at the Animal Crossing example, some of the obstacles the game removes are very. obvious. your loans have no interest or deadline, no consequence for failure. making money requires no resume, no qualifications, no applications, no stress, no fuss, nothing more than a butterfly net or fishing rod and some time to spare, at most. there are no taxes, no global warming, no troubling political news.

but there are smaller obstacles shaved off here and there as well. in the world of Animal Crossing it is not just big things that become more accessible, but also day to day things which in real life are often rendered accessible to achieve, but not to enjoy, because of the difficulties attached to them.

let's take gardening. a few posts back I talked about my own personal troubles with gardening: that it was something I did find enjoyment in, but also struggled with a great deal because ADHD presented so many challenges to doing it that I came to believe it was something I was simply inherently and permanently bad at. in Animal Crossing, on the other hand, most of those challenges don't exist. when you go to buy a plant, you always know exactly what it is. its needs are simple and straight-forward, and if the game doesn't tell you them then you can surely find them laid out clearly and easily with a quick visit to any of dozens of wikis and game info sites. there are clear signals included to help you carry out what you need to do. you can tell if you've watered a flower because it will sparkle. you can tell if a tree won't grow where you're trying to plant it, because the game will tell you so.

the gardening in Animal Crossing specifically is very simplistic. but it offers to you, and keeps, a promise which even games with more complicated requirements keep: here are the steps, here is the list of what you need to do, and if you do it right, something will grow, and grow well.

of course this also takes away some of the things that make the whole pastime worthwhile in real life. there is no sensation of digging your fingers into rich dirt, no fresh crop to pick and eat right off the stem. and seeing a pixel plant sprout and grow in stages will never quite compare to watching something very real and alive grow from a seed that you planted yourself. yet still I find distinct enjoyment in walking between the plots of my virtual garden in Animal Crossing, in raising virtual flowers and watching them bloom.

with some video games, I find the wish fulfillment to be as straight-forward as that: the emulation of an activity I want to do in real life, but find to be more difficult than enjoyable because of the obstacles associated with it. sometimes it's less direct. I have always enjoyed simulation and management games, games about building, cultivating, growing, raising, developing. but I've found myself particularly drawn to them over the past few years. building cities or kingdoms, running a large farm, managing a theme park or a zoo--there's great appeal there for me, even though I've never longed to pursue city planning or business management in the real world. but when things have felt at their most stagnant and hopeless, when I have felt unable to find any sign of progression or improvement in my own life, I have found comfort in being able to watch something grow, to put work in and see the results clear and apparent before me, however ephemeral those results are.

for me, I find that most often, the obstacles removed by doing something in a game mostly relate to the same thing: the struggle of planning, organizing and carrying out tasks, which is so often made so much easier when laid out for me as it is in a video game. it's a common criticism about some video games--sometimes, about the entire concept of video gaming--that playing them is essentially a matter of watching numbers go up. and, well, you've got me. it's true. I do like seeing numbers go up. I like seeing progress bars fill and skills unlock and quest objectives with check marks next to them. I like it because it's not something I get to experience much in real life: that sense of concrete progression, of knowing what I need to do and in what order I need to do it, of some acknowledgment and achievement for completing a task--yes, even if it is only a number going up! even if it is only a small cosmetic change, a new coat for my character, a section of map filling out, a pixel flower blooming on a pixel stem. better that than no sense of progress. better that than never really feeling sure if I've accomplished anything at all.

this is not something I always knew about myself. I've always liked video games, certainly, but thinking about the enjoyment I get out of them has gone hand in hand with learning more about how my own brain works. it's not only that video games can remove obstacles; by doing so, they can reveal to you that there were obstacles in places you never before realized. and there's value in that, I think. because sometimes it can show you that a problem you thought was in one place was actually in another place altogether. if something you think of as being boring, mundane, dull and exhausting becomes something you are willing and able to spend a lot of time and energy on, and get enjoyment out of, when it is framed in a different way--it may follow that the problem was not, as you thought, with the thing itself. the problem was in the obstacles around it.

of course, that's not always the case. the act of doing something in a game is often so thoroughly divorced from any semblance of doing it in real life that enjoying one has no bearing on enjoying the other. we play lots of games centered around doing things that most of us would never have any desire to do in real life. but sometimes it can lead you to discover that you enjoy things you didn't think you enjoyed, or are capable of doing things you didn't think you could do.

if nothing else, I think every single Animal Crossing island currently being developed, being visited, being joyfully and proudly shared online is evidence in the case against the idea that people fundamentally don't want to work and won't work if they don't have to. as is every painstakingly constructed Minecraft world, every Stardew Valley farm, every virtual city intricately planned, every virtual business budget carefully managed, every kingdom saved and map fully explored and character fully leveled and kitted out. because you don't do those things without putting time and concentration and effort into it. you just can't. it's not possible.

I think video games have a lot to tell us: about obstacles, and about effort, and about ourselves. some obstacles are incontrovertible, certainly. there are things built into the world which we can circumvent in video games but cannot, with all the best will in the world, change in our real lives. some things are always going to be more appealing virtually. my difficulties with gardening, for example, are always going to exist in some fashion because I cannot change the nature of how plants work. but knowing that something is an obstacle for you, and identifying why it is, can go a long way toward helping you figure out how to navigate around that obstacle, even if you can't remove it.

and sometimes when you realize that something is an obstacle, you realize that it doesn't need to be. that doesn't always translate to being able to do anything about it, of course. I doubt anyone needed Animal Crossing to tell them that home loans would be easier to repay without interest, and yet here we are. but I think there are a lot of things which we just sort of assume have to be difficult and boring and tiring and just thoroughly unenjoyable, because it is simply the nature of that thing, or the nature of us as people. nothing to do about it, just the way the world works.

sometimes that may be true. but surely not always.

I don't know.

but I will tell you this: by god, be proud of your virtual gardens.

they have worth.

#nonfiction #monday thing #monday thing may eighteenth

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